1
Between 1935 and 1985, the number of African Americans in labor unions increased
from an estimated 50,000 to more than three million.
1
Progress occurred slowly and in the face
of often fierce resistance from national and local unions, particularly in the building trades but
also in more liberal AFL and CIO unions.
2
The federal government played a critical role in
breaking this resistance, by passing legislation, issuing executive orders, developing state
institutions, and encouraging opportunities for civil rights litigation. This paper focuses on the
federal effort to promote civil rights in the labor movement, and in particular, the halting,
fragmented pace of this process.
When politicians passed the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), they did not
include anti-discrimination measures requested by civil rights leaders. The Democratic Party’s
reliance during this time on southern segregationists to achieve legislative goals prohibited any
type of civil rights policy. To rectify this failure, the government neither reformed the NLRA nor
instituted changes within the National Labor Relations Board. Instead, federal officials
responded with a series of “patchwork” reforms, creating different agencies at different historical
moments with different powers.
3
No one institution was given total control over the problem of
1
The most recent statistics are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Prior to 1973, the Bureau of Labor
Statistics did not collect data on African American union membership. As such, my findings are based on a
combination of archival research from the George Meany Labor Archives, the Walter Reuther Labor
Archives, the National Archives, the Library of Congress archives of the NAACP, EEOC statistics gleaned
from EEO-3 forms post-1966; statistics gathered in civil rights litigation; Census data and records gathered
from the Department of Labor. The estimate of 50,000 in 1935 comes from Ray Marshall, “Unions and the
Negro Community,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 17:179 (1964).
2
See Eric Arnesen, Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality,
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); William B. Gould, Black Workers in White Unions: Job
Discrimination in the United States, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977); Herbert Hill, Black Labor
and the American Legal System: Race, Work and the Law, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1986); August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, Black Detroit and the Rise of the United Auto Workers (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Bruce Nelson, Divided We Stand: American Workers and the
Struggle for Black Equality, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Philip S. Foner, Organized
Labor and the Black Worker, (New York: Praeger, 1982); Jill Quadagno, “Social Movements and State
Transformation: Labor Unions and Racial Conflict in the War on Poverty,” American Sociological Review
57:616 (1992).
3
The term, “patchwork” comes from Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion
of National
Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
Convention