Blacks, whites, and reds - books on the relationship between Communism, unionism and and African Americans

Roger Horowitz, "Negro and White, Unite and Fight": A Social History of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking, 1930-1990 (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1997), $17.95, 373 pp.; Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Blacks and Reds: Race and Class in Conflict, 1919-1990 (East Lansing, Michigan: Michigan State University Press, 1995), $27.95, 338 pp.

Readers of these two interesting books might find it odd to see them reviewed together. Horowitz has written a riveting account of the formation and development of one of the nation's most progressive unions, while Hutchinson barely mentions the labor movement in his study of the complex relationship between the U.S. Communist Party and African Americans. Yet both books have as major themes the connections between class and race. Horowitz shows that the United Packinghouse Workers of America made the oppression of black America, both inside the packinghouses and in the larger society, central to its struggle to organize the plants. This strategy, based in large part upon the beliefs of the radicals (including many open Communists) without whom the union would not have been formed, was successful and could have and should have served as an example for the entire CIO. In meatpacking, then, red and black alliances were made and led to glorious results. On the other hand, Hutchinson examines the overall connection between reds and blacks and, for the most part, finds decades of misunderstanding, cynicism, and failures.

Let's look first at the Hutchinson book since it deals with more general issues. Soon after its founding in 1919, the U.S. Communist Party realized that black workers were not the same as white workers in that they faced a much wider and deeper oppression, including the unremitting racism of white workers themselves. This realization generated a long and often agonizing debate within the Party over how best to reach and liberate black workers. As Hutchinson points out, however, this debate was circumscribed by the Party's unshakeable conviction that the working class as a whole was the only agent capable of the overthrow of capitalism. So while black workers might have a special role to play within the working class, they were still, foremost, a part of the working class, and no hope for revolution could be sustained outside of the ultimate unity of the working class. The trouble was that many African Americans did not make class distinctions among whites. The labor unions, for example, often barred black workers from membership, and white workers resisted, sometimes with violence, any employer use of black labor. Some employers, such as Henry Ford, were looked on with favor by some black leaders because they did hire black workers. Antipathy toward whites generated powerful "nationalist" movements in black communities, from Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association to Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam. The Communists saw such groups basically as nonrevolutionary, but the strong support which they had among African Americans meant that the reds had to find ways to compete with them.

At another point on the political spectrum were the more conservative integrationist organizations such as the NAACP. These groups sought the entry of blacks into the American mainstream and accepted much of the mainstream's individualistic, pro-capitalist ideology. The NAACP had the allegiance of most African Americans, who applauded its strong opposition to the racism which denied the entry of blacks into the mainstream. Again the Communists were faced with the dilemma of confronting a popular organization, challenging its conservatism while not alienating its members and supporters. An equally difficult problem was that posed by the anti-communist radicalism of people like A. Philip Randolph. Randolph was obviously not hostile to labor unions or to an integrated working class fighting the employers. But he was antagonistic to the reds, often virulently so. How could he and his supporters be made into allies?

Compounding these problems of politics was the fact that the Communist Party was founded largely by white immigrant groups influenced by the Bolshevik Revolution. It was dominated by whites, who, themselves, were not immune to racism. This meant that whatever overtures the reds made to African Americans would be made more difficult by racism inside of the party. Hutchinson does a good job of describing the various twists and turns made by the reds to win the support of the black masses while at the same time fighting against red racism. At times, however, he perhaps unjustifiably criticizes the sometimes doctrinaire manner in which the Communists fought internal racism. After all, how many other organizations were making any attempt at all to struggle against the nation's primary social disease? And no one can deny that the reds fought racism in the larger society, usually at great risk to life and limb.

Hutchinson makes the usual criticisms of the Communists. Ultimately they were subservient to Moscow, and this forced them to embrace policies detrimental to the building of an effective radical party here at home. We are all aware of the somersaults turned by the Party when Stalin made his pact with Hitler. Then when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the Communists turned overnight from pacifists to gung-ho supporters of the wartime no-strike agreements made by the unions. But Hutchinson points out that prior to the pact with Hitler, the Soviet Union had been complicit in the Italian slaughter of Ethiopians several years earlier. The inability of the U.S. Communists to distance themselves from the Soviet Union cost them dearly in terms of support from African Americans.

Hutchinson also argues that the Communists were never trustworthy allies, ultimately more interested in building up the Party than in liberating black Americans. They were adept at creating "front" groups, seemingly independent but under Party control. They were also skilled at "boring from within," that is, gaining entry into an organization and using their discipline to get control of it. An organization with which the reds had built an alliance could never be sure that some doctrinal shift would break the alliance and lead the Communists to form their own organization. All of these activities generated tremendous distrust of the Communists in the noncommunist black organizations and within the larger black community and ultimately doomed to failure even the best red efforts such as the American Negro Labor Congress, the International Workers Order Mutual Benefit Society, and the National Negro Congress. Hutchinson sums all of this up at the end of the book:

During the last century, many Communist Party members believed deeply in racial equality. Their campaigns against segregation, political repression, and economic equality resulted in many landmark decisions that advanced the cause of civil rights and racial justice in America. But despite their efforts, black leaders have repeatedly asked Communist leaders two questions. First, did they fight for black freedom because they sincerely believed in it? Second, given the volatile mix of racism and anti-communism in America, could blacks afford to be red, too?

DuBois, Randolph, Garvey, King, Malcolm X, Carmichael, the Panthers and the Black Muslims have not been satisfied with the answers Communists have given to either question. But how could they be? With the exception of one short moment in American history - the Depression years - Marxists have never had the type of mass following that would allow them to offer blacks an ironclad assurance of their sincerity or their security.

Thus while blacks could at times throughout recent history applaud them for their civil rights efforts, and even rally behind black Communist leaders when they were under fire, they could never really embrace the Reds. It has been that way because whenever the two groups have met, there has been a clash of race and ideology that more than a century of struggle has not resolved - and now, perhaps, never will.

While Hutchinson does a good job of scrutinizing the shortcomings of the racial strategies of the reds, he fails both to adequately discuss the failings of the many other groups agitating for racial equality and to fully examine significant red successes. After all, the NAACP's distrust of the reds had a lot to do with this organization's overall conservatism. It would have been a boon to black workers if the NAACP had eagerly endorsed the CIO, but it did not. Hutchinson implies that the Communist National Negro Congress betrayed its independent commitment to black liberation when it signed a formal pact with the CIO, a pact which the NAACP "turned ... down flat." But think how much more powerful the CIO and black America might have been had the NAACP followed the NNC's lead. Similarly, while the author criticizes the Communists' "Black Belt" hypothesis, he is a little kinder to the many dubious principles of the various black nationalist groups. As onetime Party leader, Dorothy Healey, said, "when we make mistakes, it's considered part of a terrible conspiracy; and when others do, it's just a momentary lapse of judgment."(1)

Hutchinson says that only during the Great Depression, specifically during the period of the Popular Front, did the Communists enjoy any real success among blacks. This is not entirely true. One would never know from reading this book that a black Communist, Benjamin E. Davis, won election to the New York City Council in 1943. This despite the argument made by Hutchinson that the reds were everywhere on the decline during World War Two. Davis spoke to large rallies throughout the city, in white communities as well as black, and won the support of black workers, intellectuals, artists, and musicians, some of whom paid heavy prices during the postwar red scare. Davis's victory was part of what Horne calls a "red resurgence," a period in which Party membership and support was growing, despite all of the errors which Hutchinson spends so much time elaborating. Hutchinson's failure to give the reds their due in this period helps to account for the rather strange absence in the book of a treatment of the savage repression of the Party after the war. The idea that the primary cause of the demise of the Communist Party was government oppression would not fit Hutchinson's overall analysis of blacks and reds.

Hutchinson calls the period of the Great Depression and the Popular Front the Communist Party's "heyday." Yet he devotes little space to the CIO, the one organization in and through which the reds had a lasting effect upon the lives of black Americans. The CIO was to no small degree given birth by Communists, and largely as a result of red anti-racism, the CIO stood up for black workers and their communities. As W. E. B. DuBois, himself, stated,

Probably the greatest and most effective effort toward interracial understanding among the working masses has come about through the trade unions.... As a result [of the organization of the CIO in 1935], numbers of men like those in the steel and automotive industries have been thrown together, black and white, as fellow workers striving for the same objects. There has been on this account an astonishing spread of interfacial tolerance and understanding. Probably no movement in the last 30 years has been so successful in softening race prejudice among the masses.(2)

Eventually the CIO abandoned its staunch anti-racism, probably the single most serious mistake it ever made. However, this error was also part of a larger shift to the right of CIO politics and a wholesale assault on the reds, who, to their credit, continued to wage war against racism and kept up their efforts to organize black workers in the South. If we fail to acknowledge the success which the reds had in building the CIO and through it helping to build nonracist unions and a nonracist society (and, conversely, if we fail to see the connection between racism and anti-communism), we miss something of great importance in the relationship between reds and blacks.

Fortunately Roger Horowitz's exceptional history of the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) provides us with a more nuanced account of this relationship, in the context of the establishment of a remarkable union. The UPWA was formed by radicals, some Communists and some not, in the nation's meatpacking centers of Austin, Minnesota, Chicago, Kansas City, and Sioux City, Iowa. The Chicago workers were the most numerous in the industry, and without their organization the union could not have succeeded. Chicago also had a large contingent of black packinghouse workers, many of them in critical jobs on the kill floor, and the union could not succeed unless these workers supported the union. Not coincidentally, Chicago was also where the Communists were strongest in the union, and they championed the unionization of black workers and the development of a completely interracial union. So, the strength of the reds helped to commit the union to racial equality and the union's anti-racism helped to make the union victorious in the first place. The power of the Chicago unions was felt throughout the union throughout its history, giving the UPWA a radical character shared by other left-led unions but unique in that it survived the anti-communist purges of the post-World War Two witch hunts.

The CIO leadership, which had formed a Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee in 1937 to consolidate the various local efforts to unionize and forge a national union, tried to force the union into the top-down bureaucracy of the United Steel Workers model, using every tactic available, including anti-communism. However, the members, again led by radicals (who themselves were often in disagreement), would not stand for this and ultimately were able to form a democratic union, the UPWA, in 1943. It is interesting to note that many of the reds in the union were leaders of this movement for democracy, and it is also important to grasp that democracy in the union was very much to the advantage of black workers. Even during World War Two, when the reds, according to Hutchinson and most other historians, actively condemned rank-and-file job actions (so as not to damage the war effort, i.e., so as not to help the Nazis defeat the Soviet Union), local reds in the UPWA did not abandon their members. The reds supported job actions and therefore, contrary to Hutchinson's thesis, consolidated their alliance with black workers.

Space does not permit a full accounting of the UPWA's history. Suffice it to say that this union transformed the lives of its members, who saw their living standards improve dramatically and their sense of worth as human beings soar. Remember that working in a packinghouse, preparing animals for our supermarkets, must have been (and by all accounts still is) a little like laboring in hell. Imagine extremes of hot and cold, vile smells, blood all over the place, sharp knives, slippery floors, and a killing pace, and you might begin to get the idea. Just the names of the jobs is chilling: Stockhandlers, knockers, shacklers, stickers, beheaders, hide removers, skinners, leg-breakers, foot-skinners, backers, rumpers, hide-droppers, butchers, gut-snatchers, gutters, splitters, and luggers. And the key workers were those on the "killing floor." No wonder black workers made early inroads in the packing houses; white workers went elsewhere when they had the chance.

The workers were badly split by race, ethnicity, and company policy when the Depression struck. The devastation wrought by the slump, however, made workers more open to radical change, and the radicals who had been patiently organizing or waiting for an opening took advantage of this. Unity had to be forged between the hostile groups, especially blacks and whites. To their everlasting credit, it was the reds, and not the NAACP or any nationalist group, who played the critical role in achieving this. During the Depression, the war, and well into the 1960s, black and white workers in the UPWA fought together, not just to better their working conditions and wage rates, which they did, but to fight for civil rights in the factories and in the communities in which they lived. White and black workers actually used mass tactics such as sit-ins, marches, and boycotts to integrate hotels, restaurants, and stores before the civil rights movement did the same. At every level of the union, black workers were leaders, and they helped to build a union in the 1940s and 1950s which was about the most interfacial organization in the nation. Unlike many other CIO unions, the UPWA made race a focus of union efforts, and it never purged the radicals who led them. Furthermore, the union's structure maintained local control over the national union, itself of great importance to black workers, and never gave up the local unions' right to strike; nor did it shy away from actions which were of dubious legality to maintain control over the pace of work.

Concretely, the UPWA achieved to following contractual provisions which were instrumental in winning equality for black workers: (1) equal pay for equal work; (2) an end to the lower wages for southern workers, many of whom were black; (3) open access to the highest paying jobs; (4) the continuation of seniority during layoffs, so that black men and women who entered meatpacking during World War Two, could get their jobs back when employment levels regained their wartime highs; and (5) an anti-discrimination clause which not only prohibited discrimination against employees but added the word "applicants" so that the union could attack discrimination in hiring. In connection with this last provision, Horowitz tells us that

In 1950 the Swift union arranged for both black and white women to apply for jobs and carefully monitored the employment office to determine the company's response to the applicants. While white women were courteously ushered into a back room, interviewed, and then hired, company officials brusquely turned black women away with the excuse that there were no openings. The local filed a grievance against Swift and won a landmark ruling requiring the company to hire the black women with back pay from the date they had initially applied. The international union widely publicized the Chicago victory and pressed other local unions to follow a similar strategy.

Of course, we cannot attribute these achievements solely to the reds, but neither can we neglect their role or minimize it as Hutchinson all too often does. Horowitz also reminds us that the reds were not the only radicals in town. Trotskyists, IWW members, and Socialists played important roles in both the union organizing and the union's commitment to anti-racism.

I have focused this review on what these two books tell us about the relationship between reds and African Americans. This is somewhat unfair to the Horowitz book, which investigates a lot more than this. The book includes much important material on women in the union. While the UPWA greatly improved the conditions of women in the plants, its anti-sexism did not match its anti-racism. In this it shared much with the reds, whose own organizations usually relegated women to support roles. Ironically the UPWA was sued by women members under the Civil Rights Act to end sex-segregated job classifications. Of greatest significance was the union's devotion to rank-and-file control of both the union and the jobs. The UPWA devised a system of "chains," consisting of all of the locals of the same plant. Whenever a serious problem arose on the shop floor of one local, quick communication with the other locals in the chain could lead to job actions in all of the plants. The national officers did not, unlike their counterparts in the UAW and the rest of the CIO's top-down unions, condemn local job actions as inimical to the "accord" allegedly made with employers. Instead they used them to pressure employers into respecting their members' power. In other words, the UPWA did not succumb to the bureaucratic, conservative, and anti-communist program so prominent in the rest of the union. What Len De Caux said about these unions could not be applied to the UPWA (and, I might add to most of the left-led and anti-racist unions purged from the CIO):

Once the CIO won all that capitalism would allow it...sitdowns and mass struggle gave way to union administration, dues collection, labor board briefs, detailed negotiation. The swivel-chair tribe began its own long-lasting sitdown in union office. This tribe rode to office on the broad shoulders of Lewis and the backs of the agitators, the militants, the reds. Once they arrived they turned - dutifully, patriotically, devoutly - to kick in the face those on whom and over whom they had scrambled.

Largely because the rest of the labor movement refused to follow the lead of the UPWA, the union was not able to resist the radical restructuring of the industry in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Plants in the union strongholds were closed and moved to nonunion rural areas, a move made possible in part because of technological changes in both the packing of meat and its distribution. The union simply did not have the resources to organize the new plants, and the rest of labor did not see fit to help. Today the gains won by the UPWA have been largely reversed and the Latino, Asian, and poor white workers who prepare our meat work under conditions not unlike those which prevailed before the UPWA waged its heroic struggles.

The demise of the UPWA is one of labor's great tragedies. So too is the collapse of the Communist Party and the left-led unions nourished by the blood of reds both black and white. We need to study these great movements of the past, not just to point out in relentless drumbeats their failings but to celebrate and learn from their achievements. I have a feeling that when we do, we will see that the labor movement will not be rebuilt and racism will not end without the efforts and ideas of a lot more "reds."

NOTES

1. Gerald Horne, "The Red and the Black: The Communist Party and African Americans in Historical Perspective," New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism, ed. Michael E. Brown, et. Al., (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993).

2. Cited in Michael Goldfield, "Race and the CIO: The Possibilities for Racial Egalitarianism During the 1930s and 1940s," International Labor and Working-Class History No. 44 (Fall 1993), p. 2.

Michael D. Yates is professor of economics at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, he is the author of Why Unions Matter (Monthly Review Press, Forthcoming) and Longer Hours, Fewer Jobs: Employment and Unemployment in the United States (Monthly Review Press, 1994)

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