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Footnotes 1407
appeals to the conscience and good will of the white community, especially the employ-
ing class. That the Urban League has rendered valuable services for Urban League popu-
lations throughout the country is not disputed, but it is equally true that its policy
operates within the genteel framework of conciliation and interracial good will. Its
efforts have had to be directed at winning the sympathies of white employers, profes-
sionals, and intellectual groups, and the top ranks of the hierarchy of organized labor.
With its interracial basis, it must rely upon the good will of responsible whites.” {Ibid,^
Vol. 2, pp. 265-266.)
“As an interracial, dependent organization it can never develop a program which will
spur the Negro masses and win their confidence. It has not exerted, nor can it, any
great influence upon the thinking of Negroes nor upon their course of action. It
operates strictly on the periphery of the Negro problem and never comes to grips with
the fundamentals in American racial conflict.” {lbid,y Vol. 2, pp. 271-272.)
Letter from Eugene Kinckle Jones (August 8, 1940).
Memorandum by Eugene Kinckle Jones (June 17, 1941).
Annual Conference of the Urban League in 1919, held in Detroit, Michigan.
Spero and Harris quote several cases of strike-breaking. (Sterling D. Spero and
Abram L. Harris, The Black Worker [1931J, pp. 1 40- 1 4 1.) See also, Bunche, of, cU,y
Vol. 2, pp. 268-269.
Eugene Kinckle Jones states: “No local League has ever openly engaged in strike-
breaking activities. The only case in our records . . . was , . . on a job where we had
furnished Negro workers on a project where the racial element was involved and not
the question of wages and hours.” (Memorandum, June 17, 1941.)
For a complete evaluation of this question, see Horace R. Cayton and George S.
Mitchell, Black Workers and the Nezo Unions (1939), pp. 398-412.
Bunche writes: “The labor policy of the Urban League has been spotty. The
organization’s interest in increased economic opportunity for the black worker has led
it to exert effort toward the lifting of trade union barriers against the Negro worker,
but these efforts to get the Negro into the labor unions have been, for the most part,
confined to negotiations with prominent trade union officials. No effective program for
carrying the message of organized labor to the rank and file of white and black workers
has yet been devised by the League. Moreover, it is doubtful that if a program revolving
about labor organization and white and black labor unity were instigated by the Urban
League it could be executed through the branches as they are now constituted.” (Bunche,
of, cit,y Vol. 2, p. 267.
“. . . basically the policy of the Urban League is not a policy of labor organization
or of working class unity. It is a policy thoroughly middle class in its orientation and
perspective, which is interested only in getting jobs for Negroes. The interracial and
business class structure of the directing boards of the Urban League locals have often
made it impossible for the work of the League to be as soundly liberal as the local
executive secretaries might often wish it to be.” (Ibid,y Vol. 2, p. 270.)
“It [the League] apparently has never convinced itself that one Negro worker in a
labor union may, in terms of ultimate benefits to the Negro group, weigh more heavily
than ten Negroes placed in temporary jobs as marginal workers.” (lbid,y Vol. 2, p. 271.)
To this Jones replies: “Doctor Bunche evidently has in his mind the type of organiza-
tion he would form to correct the problems as he sees them, and he judges the National
Urban League on the basis of this conception while the National Urban League has
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