Black workers, revolutionaries & the labor
movement
By Vanessa Lewis
The Great Depression that began after the 1929
stock-market crash was a period of widespread impoverishment
due to mass unemployment.
Black workers had never enjoyed a boom period. For them, the
Depression had begun by the end of 1926, when African Americans
were further impoverished as a result of massive layoffs.
By early 1929, the economy was supposed to be booming. Yet
one-fifth of all Black industrial workers-already paid as
little as two-thirds what white workers made-had been thrown
out of work.
It was common practice for employers to replace fired Black
workers with white workers at "Negro" wages or lower. This was
a graphic lesson in what is meant by the super-exploitation of
Black labor.
Racist mobs sometimes enforced such layoffs of Black
workers. Most labor unions were "white only."
It is no surprise that only the most dedicated and
far-seeing labor organizers-conscious communists-elevated the
struggle for workers' rights and especially for Black workers'
rights. For these organizers, Black-white solidarity was
central to organizing unemployed workers.
Communists set up unemployed councils. The councils demanded
both relief funds and jobs. They were the first to demand
unemployment insurance.
In these councils Black and white workers were considered
equals. Many Black workers assumed leadership positions.
A million workers demonstrate
On March 6, 1930, over a million workers throughout the
country-tens of thousands of them Black-took to the streets on
National Unemployment Day.
In Birmingham, Ala., 3,000 workers-two-thirds of them
Black-marched under the leadership of the unemployed council
demanding "Work or Relief."
In Louisiana unemployed Black and white unemployed council
members demanded "work or feed" and fought police for their
right to demonstrate.
Black and white hunger marchers held banners and recited
slogans like "No discrimination against Negro workers!" and
"Equal relief for the Negro jobless!"
In Annapolis, Md., 40 Black and 10 white hunger marchers
stormed the Maryland House of Delegates to demand a hearing on
their petitions seeking aid to unemployed workers. The demands
included using money set aside for a new prison to instead
establish an unemployment-insurance program.
By 1931, it was common to see Black workers in the
leadership of unemployed council demonstrations across the
country.
One such leader was 19-year-old Angelo Herndon, a Black
communist worker who was a veteran of the Birmingham hunger
marches. Herndon led several demonstrations of the unemployed
in the South.
During this period many Black workers became active
communists. On Oct. 8, 1933, the New York Tribune alerted the
ruling class that the growing numbers of Black communists
represented "a militant and aggressive ambition for
betterment."
Lessons of 1930s apply today
The Great Depression was one of the most rabid periods of
racist, anti-worker reaction and violence in U.S. history.
Black workers suffered the most.
They may no longer have been chattel slaves, but even as
fellow wage slaves with whites they constituted an underclass
of workers.
Communist intervention through the unemployed councils and
later the Trade Union Unity League sought to bring Black
workers-"the most exploited and oppressed of the American
working class," according to TUUL's mission statement-into the
labor movement. This effort to unite a divided working class
would be critical toward building an alliance of Black workers
and the predominately white labor movement to fight for their
mutual interests.
Communist organizing introduced a new and militant phase of
struggle for the working class. Black workers emerged from
their status as an underclass and struggled to claim their
place in the labor movement as members of the working
class.
This time was of great importance, not only to the labor
movement, but in the broader struggle for equal rights and
Black liberation within the United States.
Today the ruling class is attempting to reverse all the
gains won by working-class struggles during the 1930s. The
lessons of the role communists played during the Depression in
the struggle against racism and national oppression are more
relevant than at any other period since.
The government has lately gone to great lengths to destroy
the hard-won protections known as the safety net. This effort,
including the erosion of Social Security and perpetual cutbacks
in social services, reached a height when President Bill
Clinton signed the law repealing the federal welfare program in
August 1996.
Federal and state governments are expanding workfare-forced,
unpaid labor by welfare recipients in government and private
jobs, with the workfare workers used to replace unionized
labor.
Clinton's anti-welfare law was accompanied by severe cuts in
food stamps. And Congress is preparing to repeal the federal
public-housing law. That would assign people on welfare and the
unemployed the lowest priority for obtaining public
housing.
At the same time, poor and oppressed workers are being
criminalized and imprisoned in astonishing numbers-now over 1.6
million. In the prisons they become more slave labor.
The government aims to create a substantial underclass which
the ruling class can freely exploit.
This underclass of workfare workers and prisoners is made up
of people of many nationalities-but disproportionately Black
and Latino. This makes the workfare issue as much an issue of
racism and national oppression as it is of workers' rights.
Much as in the 1930s, those who see the need to struggle for
socialism-that is, communists-again are organizing this
underclass while pushing the much-weakened labor movement to do
the same.
Solidarity among the labor movement and the oppressed is a
necessary means not just to build a socialist society, but to
pursue the struggle for Black liberation.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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