The founding convention of the Colored National Labor Union in Washington, D.C. in 1869 as depicted in Harper's Weekly. Note the presence of women delegates. |
Isaac
Meyers did not want it this way. Neither did William H. Sylvis. Myers was
a Black 34 year old marine caulker from Baltimore who had organized a union of Black caulkers in the Chesapeake ship yards and a cooperative association to market their
services to ship builders and dry docks.
Sylvis was a White 40
year old Philadelphia iron molder who
was the founder, visionary leading light, and President of the National
Labor Union (NLU), American
labor’s first stab at a national
federation uniting existing trade
unions. In the wake of the recently
concluded Civil War and the end of slavery, both men dreamed of a united working class undivided by race.
Alas, that was not to be.
Sylvis and other Philadelphia
unionists had called a founding
convention for the NLU in New York
City 1866. He was taken ill and unable to attend that
meeting, but the organization was launched
and over the next two years had some success in attracting local unions, municipal Central
Labor bodies, and a handful of national
or international trade unions. When he NLU met in Baltimore for its
convention in 1868 it was clear that Sylvis would be elected the organization’s
president.
National Labor Union founder and visionary William Sylvis wanted to include Black unions but could not overcome the vigorous objections of delegates to the 1868 convention in Baltimore. |
Sylvis had taken note of the work of
Meyers and his Colored Caulkers Trade
Union Society and invited him to
address the convention held in his home town. Meyer reported on the progress of his union
and of the co-operative shipyard and
railway, the Chesapeake Marine
Railway and Dry Dock Company. He
also appealed for membership in the NLU on behalf of his union and a handful of
other fledgling Back unions. Sylvis, who
also envisioned worker-owned
cooperatives as a model to escape from exploitive
wage slavery, endorsed the application.
Aside from Sylvis, Black unionists
had some support. Delegate A.C. Cameron told the assembly,
“…interests of the labor cause demand that all workingmen be included within
the ranks without regard to race or nationality…”
But
it was not enough. Many organizations in
attendance had Whites only rules
embedded in their constitutions and bi-laws. Others simply feared competition from Blacks who the assumed would either undercut wages or replace their members. The
convention voted overwhelmingly not to extend membership to Black
organizations, although those few local
bodies that accepted Black membership
would be allowed to continue to do so.
Baltimore marine caulker was the founder of the Colored National Labor Union. |
Meyers was saddened, but likely not surprised. He was also determined to find a way for Black unionists to unite nationally. Acting quickly, Meyers and associates called
for a founding convention of a new
organization. On January 5, 1869 214
Black mechanics, engineers, artisans, tradesmen and trades-women, and their supporters from
21 states assembled in Washington, D.C.
Notably absent were common
laborers. The new organization would mirror the NLU philosophically and structurally and be an organization of the skilled trades.
That structure was not the only
thing the new organization had in common with its inspiration. In its founding documents it called itself
simply the National Labor Union—the
identical name to Sylvis’s organization.
Perhaps this reflected a forlorn hope
that once established and up and running it might yet be allowed to merge. To avoid
confusion newspapers covering the
founding meeting called the organization the Colored National Labor Union (CNLU). The name
stuck and quickly the organization was using that name as well.
Many issues came before the founding
body. One was a resolution calling on
the Federal Government to stop “importation of contract
coolie labor” to prevent it from becoming a “system of slavery.” This was
a slightly different take on Chinese exclusion passed by the NLU
opposing, “the importation of a servile
race, bound to fulfill contracts entered into on foreign soil.”
The wide-spread use of Chinese
workers in the construction of the Southern
Pacific Railroad and in large-scale mining operations had made eliminating
the Yellow peril the number one
issue of White unionists in California and
the west. There was a general fear that
if it continued successfully it would spread east.
The CNLU, however, couched their resolution in far less racist terms than did the NLU and
did not oppose free Chinese workers,
unbound by servile contracts, and promised to include any who wished to join in
CNLU unions. In fact the CNLU
constitution opened the organization to Whites and any ethnicity as well as to women.
Delegate John Mercer Langston, a former employee of the Freedmen’s Bureau and President
of the National Equal Right League
laid out the expansive and inclusive vision of the new organization:
We know the maxim, ‘in union there is strength.’ It has its
significance in the affairs of labor no less than in politics. Hence our
industrial movement, emancipating itself from every national and partial
sentiment, broadens and deepens its foundations so as to rear thereon a
superstructure capricious enough to accommodate at the altar of common interest
the Irish, the negro and the German laborer; to which, so far from being
excluded, the ‘poor white’ native of the South, struggling out of moral and
pecuniary death into life ‘real and earnest’ the white mechanic and laborer of
the North, so long ill-taught and advised that his true interest is gained by
hatred and abuse of the laborer of African descent, as well as the Chinaman,
whom designing persons, partially enslaving, would make, in the plantation
service of the South, the rival and competitor of the former slave class of the
country, having with us one and the same interest, are all invited, earnestly
urged, to join us in our movement, and thus aid in the protection and
conservation of their and our interests.
Among the CNLU’s other resolves were
for the extension and expansion of the Freedmen’s Bureau’s Forty Acres and a mule policy to
provide of farmland for the rural Southern poor, government aid for education, and new nondiscriminatory legislation that
would help black workers access the labor market. Items like this show that the organization
hoped to go beyond action over job
issues to be the voice of Black labor as part of a broader movement for full
emancipation and integration
into society.
Both the NLU and CNLU after initial
success would find troubled waters
ahead. Sylvis died unexpectedly on July
27, just six months after the CNLU’s founding.
Without his visionary leadership the NLU slowly foundered.
Efforts at job action by CNLU member
unions were met by the united opposition
of not only employers but the press and government, which was quick to provide police power to break any strikes. And all too often local White unions
joined that opposition. Unable to
produce improved conditions on the job, membership began to dwindle, affiliate
unions failed or disaffiliated when they could no longer afford to support a national body.
In 1872 Meyers was replaced as
President by the veteran abolitionist and
leading voice of Black aspirations, Frederick
Douglass whose newspaper, the New
National Era became the official
organ of the union. Douglas was an immensely talented and energetic man, but he had no experience
as a trade unionist or much interest in
the day-to-day administration of a labor federation. The use of his paper helped boost its circulation. The CNLU became just another platform for a broader
Black agenda. Within a couple of
years it all but disappeared as a
functioning union.
Both the NLU and CNLU were supplanted by the rising Knights of Labor, which aimed to
organized skilled and unskilled labor together and which claimed, at least, to
welcome members “without regard to race or color.” Many of the NLU’s local unions and some of
the surviving CNLU chapters switched
affiliation to the Knights. In
practice local Knights assemblies often followed
local custom in regard to Black membership.
But some strikes, including the St.
Louis General Strike of 1877, a part of the broader Great Railway Strike, were notable for cooperation between Black
and White unionists.
As for Meyers, he worked as a detective at the Baltimore Post Office between 1872 and 1879 then
operated a small Baltimore coal yard. In 1883 he was rewarded for loyal service to
the Republican Party with a political appointment as a Customs revenue officer for five years.
His public life continued as he organized and became President of the Maryland Colored State
Industrial Fair Association, the Colored
Business Men’s Association of Baltimore, the Colored Building and Loan Association, and the Aged Ministers Home of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He died Baltimore in 1891.
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