The early labor movement and race

Something that caught my eye as I read through The Fall of the House of Labor by David Montgomery

Having  decided to be a militant craft union, rather than a southern fraternal lodge, the IAM's [International Association of Machinists] leaders were anxious to affiliate with the AFL, but the AFL refused to charter a union whose constitution excluded Afro-Americans. Its founding unions - those of carpenters, typographers, molders, miners, cigar makers, and iron and steel workers - had all formally admitted black workers by then [1890], and its hopes to grow in the South required the support of southern dockers. Indeed, when the admission of the IAM was debated at the AFL's 1890 Detroit convention, a black bricklayer from Cleveland, James F. Moxley, was presiding (p.199).

Furthermore, Gompers himself worked to encourage the IAM to change policy, rather than the AFL to change policy, even going so far as to support the creation of a rival union to the IAM that he hoped would eventually merge with the IAM and help bring them into the AFL with a non-discriminatory charter.

The extent of black participation in the formative period of the labor movement, as well as in political, social, and economic life in general, is often shrouded in the fog that covers history from Reconstruction to 'Reconquista' in the 1890s. After the 1890s, the calculus of union organizing, of political campaigns, and of efforts at social mobilization more broadly changed dramatically in this regard.

...the tide of segregationist thinking and segregation laws was rising rapidly. Although prominent members of the IAM... tirelessly urged their union to drop its racial barriers and join the AFL on the AFL's terms, other metal-trades unions, such as that of the boilermakers and the blacksmiths, devised local regulations that kept out black workers, the four railroad brotherhoods had always banned them, and the ARU at its 1894 convention narrowly but definitely voted to admit whits only to that new all-grade union of railway workers. Biracial unionism survived the 1890s primarily  in industries like coal mining and longshore, where blacker workers were deeply entrenched and fought with some success to preserve their place within the workers' organization. Even the Knights of Labor had abandoned its earlier defense of black workers, [with General Master Workman] James Sovereign [speaking] publicly in 1894 in favor of deporting all Afro-Americans to Africa, to the horror of many veteran Knights (p.200).

Sure enough, the AFL and the IAM would come to a compromise: the IAM would remove the exclusionary clause, but would impose a ritual pledge that no member would propose a non-white person for membership, effectively excluding all non-whites from the union. These are the arrangements, some tacit, some explicit, others just passed over with neglect, that provided the racial fracturing of the union movement, resulting eventually in the different institutional forms given to civil rights and labor law (see Frymer's excellent account of this).

When the Fair Employment Practices Committee investigated unions in the 1940s, they found the movement to be rife with discriminatory practices, substantially affecting the structure of the labor market and opportunities for blacks to access the union jobs that were, alongside the GI Bill, greatly expanding the American middle class in the 1940s-1960s.Frymer notes that Jimmy Hoffa even acknowledged that "his union had voted to deny African Americans from being truck drivers because white drivers did not want to share close quarters with black drivers" and that the vigorous opposition of Southern Democrats and the AFL ensured that the FEPC would not be established on a permanent basis and would not include unions within the purview of the committee (Frymer, 2008 39).