Judge Roberts: the roots of his bigotry

What do Janet and Michael Jackson have in common with U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr.?

They all grew up in Indiana and had fathers who were employed in the steel industry. There are some differences though.

Joseph Jackson, Janet and Michael’s father, was born into a sharecropper’s family in Fountain Hill, Ark. Joseph Jackson moved north and worked as a crane operator at U.S. Steel’s Gary, Ind., works before becoming full-time manager of the “Jackson 5.”

John G. Roberts Jr. was born in Buffalo and is the son of Bethlehem Steel executive John G. Roberts Sr. The elder Roberts was sent to open up Bethlehem’s newest plant in Burn Harbor, Ind.

This steel boss moved his family to the exclusive community of Long Beach, Ind., which for decades was off-limits to African-American and Jewish people. “Restrictive covenants” once banned selling or leasing property to “any person who is not a Caucasian gentile.”

The future Supreme Court justice grew up in this atmosphere. He attended a private boarding school.

Unemployment rates for Latin@ and African-American youths are 80 percent or more. Summer job programs have shriveled.

But John Roberts Jr. was always able to land a good-paying summer job at Burns Harbor between semesters at Harvard. He was no more qualified than thousands of Black youths in nearby Gary, but Roberts got the job because his daddy was the plant manager.

Such favoritism didn’t prevent this hypocrite from writing memos attacking affirmative action against discrimination when he was one of Ronald Reagan’s White House lawyers.

President George W. Bush appointed Roberts to the Supreme Court. In a show of bi-partisan racism, exactly half of the Democrats in the Senate voted to confirm this bigot.

Steel and meatpacking were the first two northern industries in which African Americans were able to get jobs during the First World War. “Black membership in the USWA”—United Steel Workers of America—“totals from one-fourth (overall average) to two-thirds or more in varying locations,” wrote Cal Bonner in Workers World newspaper back in 1972.

The jobs held by African-American and Latin@ steelworkers were the most dangerous. Black workers were the majority in the coke ovens, where coal is heated up to remove impurities. These workers were 15 times more likely to get cancer.

African-American and Latino men were kept out of skilled jobs while Black and Latina women weren’t hired at all. The 1974 “Fairfield Decision” opened up jobs but came too late for tens of thousands of workers who thrown out of work when dozens of steel plants were shut down.

John G. Roberts Sr. was an enforcer of Bethlehem Steel’s apartheid hiring practices at both the Lackawanna and Burns Harbor works. Vince Copeland, a founding editor of Workers World newspaper, fought against them.

Copeland, who died in 1993, led wildcat strikes of Black and white workers at Bethlehem’s Lackawanna works outside Buffalo before being fired in 1950. He wrote about the successful struggle to get Black workers in previously all-white repair gangs in the pamphlet “The Blast Furnace Brothers.”

Milt Neidenberg, a contributing editor of this newspaper, fought Bethlehem’s racism as a unionist at Lackawanna in the 1950s and 1960s.

The late Ed Merrill, a founding member of Workers World Party, worked at Lackawanna on a track gang. He estimated that by 1970 there were 5,000 African Americans employed at Lackawanna.

It was a different story at Bethlehem’s newest facility at Burns Harbor. Built in the late 1960s, Burns Harbor is the last “integrated” steel mill to be opened in the United States. It takes iron ore and other raw materials and turns them into steel, unlike “mini-mills” that melt scrap metal.

Burns Harbor is located just ten miles from the majority Black city of Gary. Forty years ago, 5,200 African Americans were employed at U.S. Steel’s Gary Works.

Yet Bethlehem Steel scoured southern Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky and Tennessee to hire whites. It used biased psychological and aptitude tests along with interviews to keep out African-American applicants.

The biggest weapon in the corporation’s racist arsenal was the scientific-technological revolution. Corporation executives could cherry-pick job seekers because of the radically shrunken need for workers. By 1999 less than 5 percent of those hired at Burns Harbor were Black. (“If you ask me...Bethlehem turns back clock on equality,” People’s Weekly World, Sept. 4, 1999.)

Burns Harbor ultimately doomed the Lackawanna plant. Thousands of Black and white steelworkers lost their jobs there.

On March 31, 2003, Bethlehem Steel ripped off health benefits and life insurance from 95,000 retired workers and their families.

Judge Roberts wants to turn back the clock on all poor and working people, just like his father did to Black workers at Burns Harbor.

It will be up to the struggle to overturn every one of his hateful decisions.