by Paul Ortiz
Capital employed a dual-wages system (different pay according to race and gender) in the United States and South Africa to divide and conquer the working class. Unfortunately, most white-dominated labor unions played right along. Wage differentials gave even poorly paid white workers what historian George Lipsitz calls a “possessive investment in whiteness,” and they served as one of the most visible wedges between white workers and workers of color.51 When Mexican workers went on strike at the Pacific Electric Railway company in Los Angeles in 1903, they fought for an equalization of wages and solidarity with Anglos.52 In an effort to preserve the race-based wage disparity, white coworkers responded by siding with employers—repudiating a broader class alliance. Barrera notes that craft unions often barred Latinx workers from membership, hence from well-paying occupations.53 These color bars to many trades froze Mexican, Puerto Rican, and African American workers out of skilled employment.54 Such job discrimination deepened rifts within the working class and made union organizing far more difficult.55
Divisions within the working class impoverished African Americans and Latinx workers and created the spectacle whereby society’s laborers—even whites—found themselves begging employers and distant politicians to address economic issues that the nation’s leaders had no incentive to deal with. The same leaders perpetuated policies in trade, immigration, and housing that kept workers at each other’s throats while spouting pieties about being the “workingman’s friend.” Howard Kester, a cofounder of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, trenchantly observed:
Inter-racialists of the Atlanta School take particular pains to point out the ancient hatred which has existed between the poor white man and the Negro. At the same time, they take great delight in attempting to show that the rich man with his vast benevolence and paternalism is the Negro’s best friend, conveniently forgetting that if the poor white man is the Negro’s worst enemy it is the members of the so-called “best families” who force these equally exploited groups to struggle against each other.56
While Progressive Era reformers lamented sanitation conditions in the nation’s burgeoning working-class slums, the Afro-American responded incredulously: “Here in Baltimore there are men who are getting and using $200 per day for the proper support and care of their families and there are other men who must struggle along on $2 and even less. Take any family of five human beings, even from the most highly developed section of the city, and place it on a $2 daily allowance with the present cost of commodities and they will finally be shoved into a congested block.”57
Ultimately, driving down the living conditions of African Americans negatively impacted whites as well, as the Afro-American journal noted: “Down in the hill country of Tennessee, we have seen proud Anglo-Saxon stock of blue blood degenerate into feudists, into ignorant weaklings under the strain of barren and unproductive soil even when they had all the fresh air and health of the highlands. Proper food, shelter and cultural contact can only be bought with money and since the money source of the majority of colored city dwellers come in wages, it is thru wages and honesty in distribution of jobs that salvation must come.”
Intergenerational economic inequality had a devastating cumulative effect on Black and Latinx families because it meant that they would not be able to pass down meaningful amounts of wealth to their children. The economic historian Carol Shammas writes, “The bulk of household wealth in America, perhaps as much as 80 percent of it, is derived from inheritance, not labor force participation.”58 Both Jim Crow and Juan Crow ensured that working-class Latinx and African American families had far less of a financial legacy to leave to future generations.
RACE RIOTS AND REPATRIATION
In the final months of World War I and in the aftermath of the Armistice in 1918, oppressed people throughout the colonized world, as well as in Europe, struck for their freedom. Ten million war deaths and the carnage of four years of trench warfare initiated by the “civilized” powers exposed a global economic and political system in decay. The institutions that propped up that system—imperialism, white rule, and Western capitalism—were called into question as never before. While tens of thousands of African Americans were escaping the repressive South and forming insurgent chapters of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, their counterparts in Latin America and the Caribbean were challenging colonial rule with mass strikes and demands for self-government.59 Workers in Eastern Europe and Germany took inspiration from the rise of the Russian Revolution and fomented their own revolution in the streets. W. E. B. Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph, and other African American leaders believed that the social forces unleashed by the Great War would help Blacks challenge the system of white supremacy in the United States. Industrial labor union organizing committees undertook major unionizing campaigns in Chicago, Birmingham, and other urban areas.60 The most powerful unions had traditionally operated with color bars that excluded African Americans, Chinese, and others. Black workers, however, responded with guarded optimism to organizers’ efforts to build interracial locals.
It was not long, though, before the forces of reaction regained the upper hand. In the United States, a right-wing political backlash termed the “Red Scare” was designed to undermine immigrant working-class and Black militancy. This reactionary movement was led by future FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, and others who used their authority to order the arrest, the detention, and, ultimately, the expulsion of thousands of “alien” political activists. As “law and order” types such as Hoover gained ascendancy, spaces for social and economic justice organizing diminished rapidly. State and federal authorities used powers gained through the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917–1918 to disrupt legitimate protest groups while ignoring real crimes that exacerbated racial tensions. For example, in the two years leading up to the Chicago race riot of 1919, scores of African American homes were bombed, and yet state authorities conducted no meaningful investigations nor were any of the perpetrators ever found. When similar bombing attacks rocked black homes in Miami, Florida, undercover federal agents appeared more interested in spying on African Americans than in catching the guilty parties.61
The anti-Black race riots of 1917–23 and the forced “repatriation” to Mexico of Mexican Americans during the Great Depression demonstrate one political function of racism in a society that seeks out scapegoats to hide the fact that it cannot serve the needs of its citizenry. Federal malfeasance was a major factor in the racial explosions that rocked the nation. The government largely turned a blind eye to the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan in the South and to the escalation of violence against African Americans who had moved to the North during and after World War I to fill the needs of wartime production and burgeoning industries in Northern cities.
Instead of investigating the illegal suppression of Black voting in the South, in 1917, US attorney general Thomas Gregory launched an investigation into alleged illegal Black voting in the Midwest at the same time that he ordered the Justice Department to suppress the IWW.62 Members of President Woodrow Wilson’s administration even claimed that African American migration to the North had been motivated by “sinister forces” bent on undermining the nation’s political system. Black aspirations for economic betterment were defined as incendiary.63 As Department of Justice investigators interrogated African Americans in Chicago and East St. Louis about their allegedly menacing reasons for coming north, the mass media encouraged the broader public to view Black people as subversives. Newspaper readers saw hysterical headlines such as “Negroes Flock in from South to Evade Draft” (St. Louis Times), “North Does Not Welcome Influx of South’s Negroes” (Chicago Herald), “Negro Migration: Is It a Menace?” (Philadelphia Record), and “Negro Influx On, Plan to Dam It” (Newark News).64
A newly rising tide of racism was a response to the fact that Black people were waging increasingly effective struggles against white supremacy. The writer James Weldon Johnson, who also headed the NAACP, sensed a revived sp
irit of hope among African Americans during the Great Migration:
I was impressed with the fact that everywhere there was a rise in the level of the Negro’s morale. The exodus of Negroes to the North . . . was in full motion; the tremors of the war in Europe were shaking America with increasing intensity; circumstances were combining to put a higher premium on Negro muscle, Negro hands, and Negro brains than ever before; all these forces had a quickening effect that was running through the entire mass of the race.65
The NAACP had scored a major victory in 1915 with the Supreme Court’s Guinn v. United States decision, which outlawed the Grandfather Clause, legislation that allowed white voters to circumvent the barriers put on Black voters. The Guinn decision encouraged African Americans to undertake new initiatives to register to vote. By the time Black World War I veterans returned from France demanding their civil rights, the Universal Negro Improvement Association was already a mass movement and the NAACP was organizing hundreds of new branches in the South and Midwest. Black Floridians organized a statewide movement to destroy Jim Crow, and Black voters began to participate in municipal elections in the North. Perceiving this trend, the Miami Herald published a warning to its white readers on the eve of the 1920 presidential election:
WHITE VOTERS, REMEMBER!
WHITE SUPREMACY IS BEING ASSAULTED IN OUR MIDST, AND THE MOST SACRED INSTITUTIONS OF THE SOUTH ARE BEING UNDERMINED BY THE ENEMY FROM WITHIN66
The organized race riots of the era and the practice of so-called repatriation of Mexicans—actually forced deportation—demonstrate the linkages between racism, labor oppression, and inequality. Anti-Black race riots were organized by whites in Chicago, Philadelphia, Charleston, and Washington, DC, among other places. In 1919, in the course of these riots, eleven African American men were burned at the stake. In that same year, other lynch mobs murdered sixty-nine Black people, including ten who were World War I veterans. White perpetrators enjoyed an almost universal immunity from prosecution, whereas their Black victims were often incarcerated for defending their homes and neighborhoods. Whites who rioted were motivated by political, economic, and social factors. The East St. Louis race riot in 1917 was aimed in part at keeping African Americans from moving up the occupational ladder. In Western Orange County, Florida, the 1920 Election Day massacre of African Americans who attempted to vote enforced voter suppression. Whites who organized the Tulsa race riot of 1921 destroyed a thriving Black business district, and, as the historian John Hope Franklin notes, expropriated Black property.67 Mabel Little spent years building a successful hairdressing practice in Tulsa and lost it all in a day: “At the time of the riot, we had ten different business places for rent. Today, I pay rent.”68
Expropriation of black property and wealth was the order of the day. The riots often became racial pogroms and allowed white developers to take control of Black property for drastically reduced prices or for nothing at all.69 When African American sharecroppers in the Arkansas Delta in 1919 began organizing a union to demand higher wages, employers responded by launching a violent attack on the organization. Scores of workers were murdered in the Elaine, Arkansas, massacre of 1919, which drove cotton wages back down. When African Americans in Longview, Texas, began experimenting with cooperative purchasing and marketing of farm produce—thus bypassing creditors and merchants—whites in the area launched a murderous assault on the Black community.70
African American landowners in Florida were subjected to a campaign of violence that coincided with the state’s land boom of the 1920s. “Our daily newspapers tell us now of outrages in Florida,” the Pittsburgh Courier noted. “We have just read an account of a Florida mob visiting a Negro farmer and setting fire to his place to run him away from some rich Florida soil. Another farm was visited, and the owner of rich lands warned to get out of these parts at once. Of course, the sheriff of the county got busy—after the house was burned to ashes.”71 An armed column of white citizens burned office buildings and Black-owned residences in northwestern Tampa, driving off policemen who tried to stop them.72
The police investigations in these cases usually amounted to nothing. Too much profit was at stake, as the Chicago Defender noted: “According to information from reliable sources, a plan is on foot to obtain by threat all valuable property owned by our people for promotional purposes among the whites since the Florida realty boom began months ago. Northern capital has thus far squeezed out southern interest in the most choice subdivisions in white sections, reaping a harvest of gold, and what remains now for speculation is largely held by members of the Race.”73
THE GREAT DEPRESSION
Government leaders in President Herbert Hoover’s cabinet whipped up anti-Mexican sentiments to direct popular anger away from the failure of the federal government to deal with economic suffering and high unemployment.74 In 1929, the US Congress passed the Immigration Act, which enabled the US to target Mexicans for deportation. The avowed mission of the American Federation of Labor was to organize the unorganized, yet it failed abjectly to fulfill this mission when it reproached Mexican workers for taking jobs away from “real Americans.”75 Facing high unemployment, some Mexican workers voluntarily left the United States, but most who left, citizens and noncitizens alike, were forcibly deported by local officials as well as by agents from the US Labor Department, the US Immigration Bureau, and the Border Patrol.76 Habeas corpus was effectively suspended, and many workers were searched and seized without arrest warrants or any semblance of due process during the so-called repatriation. Indeed, as Zaragosa Vargas notes, “As an added insult, many American-born Mexican adults and children lacking proper identification but having dark skin and Spanish surnames were apprehended and removed to Mexico.”77 Ironically, employers periodically intervened to stop repatriation to assure their continued access to low-wage and terrorized labor. Still, by 1935, more than 350,000 Mexican and Mexican American workers had been deported to Mexico.
As Oliver Cromwell Cox observed, “Race prejudice is a social attitude propagated among the public by an exploiting class for the purpose of stigmatizing some group as inferior so that the exploitation of either the group itself or its resources or both may be justified”78 Race riots and repatriation were two tools to exploit Black and Latinx workers for their labor, steal their property, and expel them when convenient.
The great labor historian Carey McWilliams published his classic text on California farm labor, Factories in the Field, in 1935—the same year that John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath appeared. McWilliams found that growers routinely engineered terror campaigns to prevent “unionization of farm labor on any basis,” as both Mexican and white workers organized a record number of agricultural strikes in 1934. McWilliams uncovered the existence of a concentration camp near Salinas that was built to imprison farmworker union activists—although one grower claimed that the camp was constructed “to hold strikers, but of course we won’t put white men in it, just Filipinos.”79 McWilliams characterized the authority that agribusiness exerted in California as “farm fascism.”80
The Associated Farmers of California, organized in 1934, set maximum wage levels and continued the state’s tradition of bloody labor relations by organizing private armies of men to destroy farmworker organizing efforts.81 Along with their counterparts in the Deep South, California growers routinely garnered tens of millions of dollars in federal subsidies while their tenants, sharecroppers, and day laborers were kept in destitution.82 The Associated Farmers were backed by urban-based corporations that exerted enormous power in the California state legislature. McWilliams demonstrated that banks, railroads, food storage firms, paper companies, utilities, and all kinds of other firms garnered terrific wealth from California agriculture. The entities that financed the AFC’s antilabor activities included the Bank of America, the San Joaquin Cotton Oil Company, Hunt Bros. Packing Company, and other powerful firms. “The gentlemen who sit in their offices in San Francisco and Oakland and write checks to the Associated Farmers are
not the men who, wearing the armbands of the group, organize mobs to browbeat and coerce agricultural workers,” McWilliams explained. “They have cleverly stimulated the farmers and townspeople to act as their storm troopers.”83 In addition, wrote McWilliams, the corporate backers of the AFC displaced the growers’ anger at the farm revenue lost to shipping firms, banks, and railroads onto the backs of farmworkers: “The ‘allied industrial interests’ are naturally friendly to any movement or organization that will direct farm unrest, not against them, but against labor. They are willing, therefore, to finance vigilantism; to goad the farmer into fury about labor.”84
From the perspective of African Americans and Latinx people, the Great Depression meant that the majority of the American population now felt something akin to the harshness of living conditions that they had been subjected to all along. William Jones used his helm at the Afro-American to demand public relief in Baltimore: “There was a time when a community could wash its hands of the evils of badly managed industry which brought hard times, but the new idea in governmental efficiency now supposes that those who manage industry and also municipalities should see to it that when hard times come, the resources of the community, private and public, should be pooled to provide work and industrial opportunities for every good citizen.”85 Jones ridiculed President Herbert Hoover’s plan to give millions of dollars directly to bankers to solve the nation’s economic problems: “Somebody ought to tell Herbert Hoover that millions of harassed, worried, and in some cases, despondent voters, have looked far enough into this depression to know that it has been the selfish, shortsighted and greedy leadership of the bankers and captains of industry in America and throughout the world who got us into this muddle and who are unwilling to admit that it is time to make a radical change in our system of economy.”86 This was powerful rhetoric. But it would fall to working-class people to challenge the inertia that seized government at all levels.
