From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend

by Priscilla Murolo

  The Federation’s failure to end racial discrimination did not help. During the unity debates, the CIO’s Mike Quill tried to make AFL abolition of Jim Crow locals a condition for merger, and voted against the agreement. A. Philip Randolph protested the agreement’s failure to set a timetable for ending discrimination. Meany insisted “the shortest possible time” was good enough and put George Harrison of the segregated Brotherhood of Railway Clerks in charge of his new civil rights committee. Meanwhile, southern union locals endorsed the White Citizens Council and the Virginia Federation held segregated conventions.

  Union discrimination affected other minority workers. The NAACP’s Herbert Hill described for Congress how the ILGWU confined Puerto Ricans and African Americans to the lowest-paid work. AFL-CIO farm worker organizing went poorly. The National Farm Labor Union, run by onetime Southern Tenant Farmers Union leader H. L. Mitchell, got only token Federation support. The AFL-CIO started its own Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee in 1959: the United Agricultural Workers of Delano got one contract with one grower.

  Women received even less attention. In 1961, Bessie Hillman (Sidney Hillman’s widow and an Amalgamated Clothing Workers vice president) declared: “I have a great bone to pick with the organized labor movement. They are the greatest offenders as far as discrimination against women is concerned. Today women in every walk of life have bigger positions than they have in organized labor.”

  Labor racketeering was a constant threat. Some employers were glad to get “sweetheart” deals, designed—as the ILGWU’s Gus Tyler observed—“to give the union leader an income, to give the employer relief from a real union, and to give the workers nothing.” Union welfare and pension funds opened new avenues for corruption. Senator John McClellan’s Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field began televised hearings in 1957. The most spectacular revelations tied Teamster president Dave Beck to rigged elections, extortion, and criminal associations. When the Teamster national convention replaced Beck with Jimmy Hoffa, already implicated in sweetheart contracts and welfare-fund fraud, the AFL-CIO expelled the union. Hoffa did not go easily. He made jurisdictional agreements with some AFL-CIO affiliates, raided others, and mounted an organizing drive in Puerto Rico. He explored joining the independent ILWU in a new transportation federation. He resisted a string of indictments with legal ploys. The Teamsters grew.

  Teamsters got the most headlines, but the McClellan Committee also investigated Hotel and Restaurant Workers, Operating Engineers, Allied Industrial Workers, United Textile Workers, Laundry Workers, and Bakery and Confectionery Workers. The Federation expelled the laundry and bakery unions along with the Teamsters. The cleanup did not slow passage of a new federal labor bill in 1959, the Landrum-Griffin Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act, which imposed financial disclosure and fiduciary responsibility on pension and welfare fund administrators. The Act included a “Worker’s Bill of Rights,” which detailed what a union owed its members (a copy of the union contract, for example), set standards for electing union officers and disciplining locals, and banned convicted felons and Communists from union office for five years from their release from prison or separation from the party. Though the AFL-CIO wanted the funds regulated and already banned ex-Communists and felons from office, Meany blasted Landrum-Griffin as government interference in union business.

  Government regulation did not resolve every labor dispute. In 1959, USWA started work on a new contract. The union argued that increased productivity and industry profits allowed raising wages to cover the higher cost of living. Steel executives opposed any increase and demanded work rule changes to permit the use of new technology. The steelworkers walked off the job in mid-July, and industries like auto, which bought steel for their own use, began slowing or shutting down too. In October Eisenhower invoked Taft-Hartley and set up a board of inquiry. When the board failed to find a compromise, the Justice Department took out an injunction; the union went back to work and waited for the injunction to expire. After the Kaiser Company agreed to union terms, on January 5, 1960, other steel companies accepted a deal with increased benefits, a deferred pay raise, and no change in work rules.

  USWA president David McDonald declared it the best steel contract ever. Many steelworkers disagreed, and they were not the only rank-and-file unionists to criticize their leadership. UAW members staged wildcat strikes over speedup in 1955, more in 1961, and even more in 1964 (which Reuther finally sanctioned). In 1966, the machinists shut down 60 percent of the country’s air flights for five weeks in a wildcat over “chain gang conditions.” In 1967, over a thousand proposed contracts were rejected by membership votes.

  The AFL-CIO’s political record in the 1950s had been mixed. The Federation supported and saw passed improved Social Security benefits and coverage, a minimum wage increase, and raises for federal employees. Labor support was crucial to Democrat John Kennedy’s very narrow win over Vice President Richard Nixon in 1960. The administration—headed by Lyndon Johnson after Kennedy’s assassination in 1963—backed several labor initiatives, expanded unemployment benefits, and let federal employees organize. Johnson supported the repeal of Taft-Hartley’s “right to work” Section 14-b. (Republicans filibustered the measure to defeat.) The Federation backed some important civil rights measures including the twenty-fourth Amendment eliminating poll taxes in federal elections, and the 1964 Civil Rights and 1965 Voting Rights acts. As Johnson developed his “War on Poverty” programs with labor support, the AFL-CIO seemed to be the main U.S. institution regularly supporting a liberal social agenda. There were limits. Randolph started the Negro American Labor Council in 1960 to press for minority hiring on government building projects. After the Council endorsed the NAACP’s criticism of AFL-CIO racial practices, Meany had Randolph censured at the 1961 convention for being “divisive.” When Plumbers Local 2 members walked off a job at the New York City-financed Bronx Terminal Market to protest the hiring of one black and three Puerto Rican plumbers, Meany defended his old local.

  The Democrats provided other opportunities for labor-government cooperation. Meany had been critical of Eisenhower’s disinclination for confrontation in the Suez and Hungarian crises in 1956, and Fidel Castro’s takeover in Cuba on January 1, 1959, confirmed his fears. Kennedy’s Labor Secretary Arthur Goldberg helped Meany set up the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD) and provided government funding. ORIT director Serafino Romualdi headed the Institute, and businessmen with Latin American interests like David Rockefeller and United Fruit chief J. Peter Grace sat on its board. In 1962, AIFLD operatives financed strikes in British Guiana, leading the British to depose popularly elected (and socialist) prime minister Cheddi Jagan. In 1964, its Brazilian Institute for Democratic Action provided new leaders for the unions that had supported populist João Goulart, deposed in a U.S. –backed military coup. By 1965, all AIFLD operatives were CIA professionals. The African American Labor Institute, another “AFL-CIA” program, started in 1962.

  In the mid-1960s, Walter Reuther proclaimed, “The labor movement . . . is developing a whole new middle class.” Yet not everyone was doing so well. A recession in 1960–61 pushed unemployment to 6.8 percent. Kennedy increased spending and cut taxes—especially corporate—to jumpstart a boom, but it did little to reduce unemployment.

  Black unemployment stood at 11 percent in 1962. The tightening job market helped maintain job discrimination, derailing attempts to place more women and minority workers in jobs still mainly reserved for white men. Technological innovations continued to sweep through industry. Containerization eliminated many jobs on the docks, technical changes to trains reduced crew sizes, new printing technologies wiped out an entire craft. Fewer autoworkers made more cars, fewer steelworkers more steel. In once bustling industrial cities like Camden, New Jersey, corporate flight to lower-wage locations had begun to produce vast wastelands of crumbling factories, derelict homes and churches, streets littered with trash and vacant lots s
tacked high with garbage, and an omnipresent stench of social collapse.

  Year by year the costs of empire mounted. The defense budget jumped from its 1950s level of $40–50 billion per year to $70 billion by 1967. Costs included lives as well as dollars: the peacetime draft tripled after 1965 as Johnson escalated U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia. More and more working-class conscripts and volunteers began coming home in body bags. The Cold War formula for social peace was more and more dysfunctional.

  CHAPTER

  10

  THE SIXTIES

  According to legend, American workers opposed the radical movements that shook the nation in the 1960s. Widely reproduced news photos from the era show hard-hatted construction workers attacking long-haired anti-war demonstrators in New York City. From classrooms to barrooms, Americans invoke these stereotypes as they debate the sixties. Workers are routinely cast as conservatives, and the radicals as youth out of touch with the working class.

  The real story is more complicated. The turmoil associated with the 1960s ran through more than one decade. Politically speaking, the “sixties” began in the mid-1950s and extended well into the 1970s. Much of the ferment centered on campuses, but insurgent movements and ideas also reverberated from rural communities to inner cities, from churches to the military, from factories to rock concerts, from local school boards to national political conventions. Nor were all sixties activists from the college-educated middle class; working people joined and sometimes led civil rights protests, antiwar demonstrations, feminist projects, gay and lesbian initiatives, and militant movements to empower people of color and poor people across the board. Some unions plunged into social activism, working with community groups and even radical students. And despite opposition from most labor officials, the unrest spilled into other unions as well. To a large degree, then, sixties movements were workers’ movements. Their causes often polarized the nation, but the divisions did not fall neatly along class lines.

  IN THE SPIRIT OF MONTGOMERY

  More than twenty years after canceling his 1941 March on Washington, A. Philip Randolph led a new “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” on August 28, 1963. Endorsed by every major civil rights organization and the AFL-CIO’s Industrial Department, sponsored by the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the United Auto Workers, and the Negro American Labor Council, this march turned out some 250,000 people, including many thousands of union members. They heard Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., proclaim, “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed—we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.” The civil rights movement pursued this dream through direct action. The rally in Washington capped a spring and summer of mass demonstrations across the South, with more than 20,000 arrested for protesting Jim Crow.

  Direct action protests had been mounting since the mid-1950s, when black residents of Montgomery, Alabama, desegregated the city’s buses. On December 1, 1955, riding home from her job as a department store seam-stress, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. E. D. Nixon, an officer in the Sleeping Car Porters, bailed her out. Both Parks and Nixon were longtime activists with the NAACP, and they had been seeking a way to mobilize the black community. Her arrest now furnished the spark. The next day they organized a meeting to plan a community response. Out of this came a call for a bus boycott on Monday, December 5 (as it happened, the same day the AFL-CIO first met).

  The boycott was solid. That afternoon its organizers formed the Montgomery Improvement Association, chose young Baptist minister Martin Luther King, Jr., to head the group, and debated whether to extend the boycott. That night thousands of people gathered, “on fire for freedom,” as one newsman reported. They demanded that the boycott continue until black passengers could ride the buses on the same terms as whites. For more than a year, black workers throughout Montgomery walked for hours or car-pooled to work. Some lost their jobs for taking part in the boycott, and boycott leaders were indicted (King was tried, convicted, and fined). In November 1956, the Supreme Court ruled that the law segregating Montgomery’s buses was unconstitutional, and the city received a cease-and-desist order on December 20. The next day Rosa Parks took a seat at the front of the bus.

  Over the next decade, the spirit of Montgomery swept through black communities across the South. In the first year alone, protests against segregation got underway in more than forty cities and towns. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, founded in February 1957 and headed by King, started several voter registration drives coordinated by veteran NAACP organizer Ella Baker.

  Beginning on February 1, 1960, in Greensboro, North Carolina, black students sat down at segregated lunch counters in southern cities and refused to leave until served. In April a conference organized by Baker formed the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. SNCC protests in Albany, Georgia, in November 1961 filled the city’s jails. In spring 1963, King led a “children’s crusade” in Birmingham, Alabama—mass demonstrations of elementary and high-school students dispersed by fire hoses and police dogs on national television. Northern student activists dispatched groups of “freedom riders” into the South to challenge segregation in interstate transportation facilities and organized the 1964 “Freedom Summer” voter registration campaign in Mississippi.

  Though youth often led the way, the movement was a family and community affair. As Sheyann Webb later recalled, “I asked my mother and father for my birthday present to become registered voters.” Webb, who turned eight in 1965, lived in Selma, Alabama, where a series of mass community demonstrations for voting rights began in January and culminated two months later in a fifty-four-mile march to the steps of the state capitol in Montgomery, where the marchers were greeted by a cheering crowd including A. Philip Randolph and Rosa Parks.

  Jim Crow was worst in rural Mississippi. In Sunflower County in the Mississippi Delta, more than 60 percent of the population—but less than 2 percent of the electorate—was African American. When SNCC came in August 1962 to ask who would like to register to vote, Fannie Lou Hamer, a third-generation sharecropper and the granddaughter of slaves, raised her hand and began a career as a civil rights leader. She lost her plantation job and had to leave her home; white racists spit on her, shot at her, and once nearly beat her to death. She refused to back down, and helped launch the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. In 1964, she and other MFDP leaders went to the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City to challenge the credentials of the official (and all-white) state delegation. When President Johnson learned the issue might be debated on the convention floor, he sent Vice President Hubert Humphrey to quash the challenge.

  The vote was never an end in itself for Hamer. She also promoted the Mississippi Freedom Labor Union, founded in April 1965. That spring and summer the union mobilized plantation workers to strike for the eight-hour day at minimum wage, sick pay, health and accident insurance, equal employment practices, and an end to child and elder labor. This inspired similar strikes by cooks, maids, and custodians. When the MFLU fell apart over the winter, Hamer started “Freedom Farm,” a cooperative that bought land to raise food for its members and cotton for cash.

  Though the Democratic Party rebuffed the MFDP, the civil rights movement did win concessions from the Johnson administration. In July 1964, the President signed the Civil Rights Act, which prohibited discrimination by race, color, sex, religion, or national origin in voter registration, employment, public education, and public accommodations. In August 1965, he signed the Voting Rights Act, which barred states from using literacy tests and other devices to disenfranchise people of color and empowered federal officials to register voters turned away by local authorities.

  Johnson also declared a “War on Poverty.” The new Office of Economic Opportunity administered programs assisting poor people, especially those excluded from relief and aid programs run by state and local white supremacist governments. The Job Corps provide
d training and employment to youth from poor communities. Community Action Programs funded social services provided by local civil rights projects. The federal government funded adult literacy programs and the Head Start program for preschoolers. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 gave direct federal aid to local school systems for the first time, if they were racially integrated or desegregating in good faith. Fulfilling a New Deal promise, Congress passed the Medicare and Medicaid Act in 1965: Medicare subsidized health insurance for the elderly; Medicaid paid medical expenses for indigent households.

  Civil rights activists faced brutal and sometimes murderous reprisals at every step. Racists bombed King’s and Nixon’s homes in 1956. White mobs assaulted SNCC sit-ins in 1960. A Freedom Ride bus was firebombed outside Anniston, Alabama, and riders beaten in Anniston, Birmingham, and Montgomery in 1961. The Klan bombed a Birmingham church in 1963, killing four girls. In Mississippi, two SNCC workers were shotgunned in Ruleville in 1962, activist Medgar Evers was assassinated outside his house in 1963, and three students were abducted, tortured, and killed during Freedom Summer in 1964. Local and state police often collaborated with white supremacist vigilantes—the Alabama attacks on Freedom Riders were carried out under police supervision, and Hamer got her beating in the police station in Winona, Mississippi. Activists and protesters were arrested and jailed by the tens of thousands.