… as early as its founding convention of 1866 the [National Labor Union] wrestled with the attempt to make black inclusion a reality, and by 1869 it had asked black delegates to form their own all-black organization. The result was the Colored National Labor Union (CNLU), whose 214 delegates gathered in Washing, choosing Isaac Myers as its president; Frederick Douglass headed the organization after 1872. ‘It is not without interest,’ historian Rayford W. Logan notes, ‘that the first large-scale exclusion of Negroes by private organizations in the postbellum period was the handiwork of organized labor.’
… The NLU’s solution of encouraging equality but not integration, urging the formation of separate black trade unions, ‘was a first halting note,’ according to W.E.B. Du Bois. ‘Negroes were welcomed to the labor movement, not because they were laborers but because they might be competitors in the market, and the logical conclusion was either to organize them or guard against their actual competition by other methods. It was to this latter alternative that white American labor almost unanimously turned.’ The recommendation of a specially formed NLU Committee on Negro Labor reveals the hamstrung quality of the members’ deliberations: ‘While we feel the importance of the subject, and realize the danger in the form of competition in mechanical Negro labor,’ the committeemen concluded, ‘yet we find the subject involved in so much mystery, and upon it so wide diversity of opinion amongst our members, we believe that it is inexpedient to take action on the subject.’ Du Bois cites the NLU’s failure to bridge the divide of race as a fatal misstep. Relegating the black worker to a role as a competitor and a prospective under-bidder’ and asking him, ‘when he appeared at conventions…to organize separately; that is, outside the real labor movement,’ was nothing less than ‘a contradiction of all sound labor policy.’
Philip Dray,
There Is Power In A Union, pp. 81, 83-84 (via
ziatroyano)
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