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Vol. 79/No. 42 November 23, 2015
(Books of the Month column)
1943 miners’ strikes set example for fight for Black rights
Fighting Racism in World War II, a collection of articles, pamphlets,
letters and resolutions from the press of the Socialist Workers Party
during the second imperialist world war, is one of Pathfinder’s Books of
the Month for November. “Lessons of Miners’ Strikes,” the selection
below, is from the May 22, 1943, Militant. The United Mine Workers
carried out a series of strikes that year, defying the War Labor Board
and President Franklin Roosevelt. The miners won a raise from $7 to
$8.50 per day, the first break in the wartime wage freeze. With over
half a million members, the UMW was one of the biggest unions in the
country, and this was the largest single strike in U.S. history up to
that time. Author Albert Parker urges Walter White, secretary of the
NAACP, and A. Philip Randolph, president of Brotherhood of Sleeping Car
Porters, both leaders of the March on Washington movement, to follow the
miners’ example and refuse to subordinate the struggle for Black rights
to Washington’s imperialist war. Copyright © 1980 by Pathfinder Press.
Reprinted by permission.
BY ALBERT PARKER
The delegates to the coming conferences of the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People and of the March on Washington
movement can learn a good deal from the current mine struggle.
The government, the coal operators, the press, and the radio threw
everything they had at the miners. They threatened them, they coaxed
them, they appealed to their patriotism, they exerted every form of
pressure they had at their disposal. But they did not shake the miners.
If the miners win, it will be because they asserted their independence
of the government and followed a policy based on their own needs. If
they had listened to all the false arguments of the administration and
the press and the labor fakers and the Stalinist betrayers, if they had
succumbed to the demands for “national unity” with themselves at the
bottom and the coal operators on top, if they had let themselves be
talked out of the use of their strongest weapons — then surely they
would have gained nothing.
This is of decisive importance to every Negro fighting to achieve
equality and to every organization working to abolish Jim Crow. For the
enemies faced by the miners in their fight are substantially the same
forces standing in the way of Negro advancement. In peacetime these
forces are always exerting pressure against the labor movement and the
Negro people; in wartime they exert a hundred times as much pressure,
and intervene more openly in the affairs of labor and Negro
organizations, hoping to dominate them and stifle all militant struggles.
It isn’t that Roosevelt calls Walter White or A. Philip Randolph to the
White House and tells them that they can’t do this or that (although he
did virtually that in the case of the proposed march on Washington that
was scheduled to take place in July 1941). The administrative
intervention into the affairs of Negro organizations is usually a lot
more subtle than that. It exerts its pressure less directly, but just as
effectively.
“We must have national unity in time of war,” says the administration.
And while it is saying it, Negroes are being segregated in the armed
forces; the Fair Employment Practices Committee is deprived of whatever
little effectiveness it ever had; Negroes are being lynched and
terrorized in the South, discriminated against in jobs and in housing.
What is this “national unity”? Well, if you abide by what is going on
and don’t do anything to change things, that’s national unity. And if
you denounce these things and speak with determination against them and
appear to be serious about ending the second-class citizenship status of
Negroes, then you are threatening national unity and you are accused of
stimulating race antagonism and inciting race riots and helping the Axis
and betraying your own brothers in the armed forces, and the capitalist
press will call you all kinds of nasty names. (If the capitalist press
forgets to call you a few names, the Stalinists will step in and supply
them.)
As a result you may lose your job if you are a worker, and you may lose
whatever “friends” you have in Washington if you are a leader. All of
this exerts tremendous compulsion on the Negro leaders who don’t want to
lose influence with what they call the “humanitarian” administration in
Washington. And so although Roosevelt doesn’t tell these leaders what to
do and even does not object to petitions and occasional demonstrations
which help to blow off a little steam, there are certain things that
will be frowned on and disliked in the White House, and, in nine cases
out of ten, the labor and Negro leaders just don’t do them.
The delegates to the NAACP and MOWM conferences will have to make up
their minds. Either they will continue to permit their organizations and
leaders to be subservient to the administration — or else they will
assert their independence, as the miners did, and break the grip of
Roosevelt’s domination over their organizations and policies and
activities. Either they will work out a program based on the needs of
the Negro struggle and go ahead on the road to equality — or else they
will permit their organizations to continue to function in such a way
that Roosevelt and his southern Democratic supporters will be satisfied.
The lesson to be learned from the miners’ struggle and from the state of
the Negro organizations today is that the basic requirement for a
successful struggle against discrimination and segregation in wartime is
a policy independent of the administration’s desires and unspoken dictates.
Related articles:
‘$15 and a union’ protests mobilize in over 270 cities
Unions, opponents of cop brutality join actions
Pakistan factory collapses as bosses ignore worker protests
On the Picket Line
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