—Sylvester Loving, B1Daily

The American labor movement was supposedly built around a simple idea: workers have more power together than they do divided.

Yet American history contains an enormous contradiction. Black workers fought for higher wages, shorter hours, union representation and safer workplaces alongside the broader working class, while Black labor leaders helped connect economic justice to the Civil Rights Movement.

Still, many predominantly white unions spent decades excluding the very Black workers whose participation could have made organized labor stronger.

The question is why.

The uncomfortable answer is that racial solidarity frequently proved more powerful than class solidarity.

When the Union Card Had a Color Line

Racial exclusion wasn’t incidental to early organized labor.

The National Park Service notes that railroad brotherhoods formed during the nineteenth century sometimes explicitly barred nonwhite workers from membership, leaving Black railroad workers concentrated in lower-status service positions.

The problem persisted well into the twentieth century.

The National Archives reports that in 1930, no more than 50,000 of roughly 1.5 million Black workers employed in transportation, mining and manufacturing belonged to trade unions. Many unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor refused to admit Black workers.

That created a poisonous contradiction.

A white worker could demand that management respect the dignity of labor while simultaneously supporting rules preventing the Black worker beside him from joining the same organization.

The Fear of Black Competition

Part of the explanation was brutally economic.

Some white workers viewed Black workers not as potential allies but as competitors for jobs.

This conflict had roots reaching deep into the nineteenth century. The U.S. Department of Labor documents instances in which white workers protested employers hiring Black workers into skilled and semiskilled positions. In one 1847 dispute, striking white workers demanded the removal of recently hired Black employees from particular jobs.

Instead of demanding that every worker receive higher wages, racial prejudice encouraged workers to fight over who should be permitted to obtain the better job.

Employers could benefit enormously from that division.

A workforce fighting itself has considerably less energy available for fighting management.

Black Workers Built Their Own Power

Black workers didn’t simply wait for white unions to welcome them.

They organized.

One of the greatest examples was the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, founded in 1925 and led by A. Philip Randolph.

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Pullman porters performed exhausting service work aboard America’s railroads while confronting racial discrimination and poor working conditions. Their organizing campaign lasted years and encountered resistance not only from the Pullman Company but initially from the AFL itself. The Brotherhood eventually secured recognition and a collective-bargaining agreement that improved wages and working conditions.

Randolph understood something that parts of organized labor were painfully slow to recognize:

Black economic freedom and workers’ rights were connected struggles.

He later pressured President Franklin Roosevelt over discrimination in defense employment and became one of the major organizers behind the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Not Every White Union Followed the Same Path

History gets distorted if every white worker or labor organization is placed in the same bucket.

The Congress of Industrial Organizations represented an important departure from some earlier practices. The CIO organized mass-production workers and was generally much more willing than traditional AFL craft unions to organize across racial lines.

There were also interracial unions and white labor activists who fought racial discrimination.

But discrimination remained powerful enough that Black unionists continued fighting exclusion even after the AFL and CIO merged in 1955. According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics historical review, the last AFL-CIO affiliate did not eliminate a constitutional “whites only” provision until 1964.

That is astonishingly recent history.

Employers Could Exploit the Divide

Racial exclusion also produced a disastrous strategic weakness.

When unions excluded Black workers, employers could hire Black workers outside those unions, including during labor disputes. White workers could then blame Black workers for weakening strikes while ignoring the obvious question:

Why weren’t those workers inside the union in the first place?

A. Philip Randolph repeatedly argued that Black and white workers had common economic interests precisely because employers benefited when workers fought one another.

Racism therefore wasn’t merely morally indefensible.

From a labor perspective, it could also be economically self-defeating.

Every worker excluded from collective bargaining was another worker management could potentially employ outside the union’s bargaining structure.

Black Labor Became Civil Rights Labor

The connection between Black labor organizing and civil rights eventually became impossible to ignore.

Randolph helped force employment discrimination onto the national political agenda. Black union activists such as E.D. Nixon participated in the Civil Rights Movement. And when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis in 1968, he was there supporting Black sanitation workers fighting for better treatment and union recognition. The AFL-CIO itself places that strike on its labor-history timeline.

The famous signs carried by those workers read:

I AM A MAN.

Few statements better capture the intersection between labor and Black freedom.

The demand wasn’t merely for another paycheck.

It was for dignity.

Racism Cost the Entire Working Class

The great tragedy is that organized labor’s racial divisions ultimately weakened something that could have been much stronger.

Imagine an American labor movement that had aggressively organized Black workers from the beginning instead of permitting segregated locals, exclusionary membership rules and discriminatory job structures.

Millions more workers might have entered collective bargaining earlier.

Instead, many Black workers were forced to fight two battles simultaneously: against employers for economic power and against discrimination within the labor movement itself.

Black workers nevertheless organized, marched, struck and built institutions of their own.

And figures such as A. Philip Randolph eventually demonstrated what American labor could accomplish when economic justice and racial equality were treated as allies rather than competitors.

That history leaves organized labor with a hard lesson.

When white workers pushed Black workers away, they weren’t simply weakening Black labor. They were shrinking their own army, handing employers a divided workforce and proving that racism could persuade workers to surrender collective power in exchange for racial hierarchy.

—Sylvester Loving, B1Daily