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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - Appendices - 6. Pre-War Conditions of the Negro Wage Earner in Selected Industries and Occupations - 10. Tobacco Workers - 11. Textile Workers
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mo An American Dilemma
Its main strategy seems to have been to sell the right of using the union label to a few
employers, who did not have to pay a high price for getting their conditions of work
accepted by the union. Then, too, it has been one of the most consistently undemocratic
of all American organized labor groups. Between the years 1900 and 1939 there was not
1 single national convention, and the leadership was fundamentally the same during this
whole time. The leaders would not retire even because of old age; the rank-and-file
membership had to institute prolonged legal proceedings to reintroduce democracy and
establish a new, more liberal and more efficient leadership. Before this certain significant
successes had been won in the form of increased membership and contracts with large
employers, particularly after the Supreme Court had upheld the National Labor Rela-
tions Act in 1937. The change in leadership strengthened this trend still further.®
It is evident that the Negro could not expect any great advantages from the union
as it functioned before this reorganization. Where Negroes were organized, they were,
and still are, for the most part kept in segregated locals. This system, of course, may
appear as much more “natural” in the tobacco industry than in many other lines of
work, since there is a strict occupational race segregation in tobacco, but it has made
racial cooperation more difficult. The new regime has been much more friendly to
Negroes than the old one. For the first time since 1900 a Negro has been elected vice-
president. Negroes and whites are to be organized in the same locals “whenever
possible” and, in actual practice, this policy has been followed in at least one case
(Memphis). In the Virginia-North Carolina area there is a “joint shop committee”
representing white and colored locals. These beginning interracial efforts may promise
something for the future, but so far there has not been any complete understanding,
nor grounds for the hope that the union will help the Negro in breaking up the occu-
pational pattern of segregation in the tobacco industry. In some places, particularly in
Richmond, it has been difficult to make the white local leaders interest themselves in the
Negro. Few attempts were made to get Negroes organized, and this made Negro workers
at some of the local stemmeries start a series of successful strikes on their own in 1937-
1938. They were encouraged by the C.I.O., which helped them organize themselves
independently. A group of white workers, members of the Amalgamated Clothing
Workers (C.I.O.), at one time joined their picket line. The C.I.O. has competed with
the T.W.I.U. in other places, and this threat has helped to make the local leadership
of the A.F. of L. union more aware of the necessity of admitting the Negro to mem-
bership.’*
II. Textile Workers
We shall consider the textile industry, not because it is a major “Negro industry,”
but—quite the opposite—because it is the main Southern industry excluding Negroes.
It is the largest of all manufacturing branches in the South, yet it fails to use any Negro
labor, except for limited menial purposes, such as sweeping, cleaning and yard labor.
The Southern textile industry underwent a continued expansion during the ’thirties
but Negroes derived little, if any, gain from it. The proportion of Negro workers in
• Northrup, of, cit,^ pp. 207-235. Northrup has brought together his material on the
tobacco workers union in an article, “The Tobacco Workers International Union,” The
Quarterly Journal of Economics (August, 1942), pp, 606-626. The references here, how-
ever, are to the thesis.
^ Idem,, and Federal Writers’ Project, The Negro in Virginia (1940), pp. 308-311,
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