Local 6, was decent enough, if unexceptional: the departmental steward accompanied Tiny to the foreman’s office to initiate a grievance for racial discrimination.
“What happened next,” in the words of the article, “was beautiful,” but it was not exactly predictable. Tiny’s coworkers shut down their assembly line, and then proceeded to inform other nearby departments and lines about the incident. In solidarity with Tiny’s grievance, workers in at least four other departments walked off their lines, and hundreds of them gathered spontaneously outside the office of the racist foreman. This action clearly violated the standard procedure for handling grievances, and management representatives threatened the workers with suspension if they didn’t return to their stations. No one complied. At this point the UAW representatives stepped in to broker a compromise: if the workers went back immediately, only the steward on Tiny’s line would be suspended. This too was unacceptable to the assembled workers, and they stood their ground until the company agreed to settle Tiny’s grievance on the spot and pay him his bonus. Having won their demand, the workers returned to their jobs.
The Insurgent Worker does not indicate whether or not any STO members were involved in this action, but it certainly reflects the group’s approach to fighting white supremacy within the framework of the workplace organizing described in the previous chapter. By struggling, and winning a victory (however modest), around the demands of a black employee, the workers had enhanced their collective sense of power while taking a stand against racism. As the article noted: “A significant thing about this walkout was that it was initiated and led by black workers over the issue of white supremacist discrimination, and the majority of white workers supported the action and joined the walkout. All the workers regarded Tiny’s problem as their problem. This is the meaning of class solidarity.” In this sort of situation, STO’s primary objective was to draw white workers into such struggles, despite the hesitation of many whites to view discrimination as an issue that affected them. These efforts were not driven exclusively, or even primarily, by moral considerations. Instead, the organization’s opposition to white supremacy was rooted in a detailed theory of US history, a sophisticated analysis of world affairs, and a precise strategy for revolution, each of which deserves careful examination.
* * *
Just as Don Hamerquist had taken the lead in articulating the theories that grounded STO’s approach to workplace organizing, so in turn did Noel Ignatin pioneer the group’s understanding of white supremacy. Where Hamerquist took his cues from Antonio Gramsci, Ignatin rooted his analysis in the work of W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois was a black intellectual and historian from Massachusetts, long-time editor of The Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and a proudly unorthodox Marxist throughout most of his life. His 1935 masterwork, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880, challenged the traditional white historiography that viewed the post-Civil War era as an unfortunate blot on the otherwise glorious history of the United States. Instead, said Du Bois, Reconstruction represented the most radically democratic period in US history, and the closest the country had yet come to working-class rule. Just as the Prison Notebooks served as the ur-text of STO’s theory of consciousness and thus of its workplace campaigns, so did Black Reconstruction function as the pivot of the group’s theory of US history, which in turn was the first building block of its analysis of white supremacy.
Almost alone among historians of his era, Du Bois placed the experiences of black people at the very center of the history of the United States. The contradiction between the rhetoric of democracy and the reality of slavery “was the great and primary question which was in the minds of the men who wrote the Constitution of the United States.”186 Slavery was the central experience of black workers, who constituted “the ultimate exploited.”187 It was also an indispensable component of the developing economic power of the US after the Revolution. This combination of misery and success was explosive: “It was thus the black worker, as the founding stone of a new economic system in the nineteenth century and for the modern world, who brought civil war in America. He was its underlying cause, in spite of every effort to base the strife upon union and national power.”188 These efforts included not only those of the leading political and military figures during the war, but also those of historians—whether of the right or of the left—who in later years recorded and interpreted the causes, course, and consequences of the war.
If the black experience had been the essential trigger of the Civil War, it naturally followed that the actions of black people during the war were pivotal in determining its outcome. Here, Du Bois highlighted the importance of the mass escapes that steadily depleted the slave population of the South over the course of the Civil War, as blacks fled toward the Union lines. This was “the quiet but unswerving determination of increasing numbers no longer to work on Confederate plantations, and to seek the freedom of the northern armies.”189 Even before the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, the geographic movement of black people damaged the Confederacy’s ability to function while simultaneously offering the Union army additional, and often enthusiastic, laborers (and in some cases soldiers). In describing these events, Du Bois gave a novel twist to a traditional concept of working-class radicalism by naming the process a “general strike” of slave laborers. Such an interpretation, equally unacceptable to right-wing and left-wing historians of his era, represented a bold re-interpretation of the Civil War as an economic conflict in which the conscious decisions of masses of slaves were decisive factors.
Similarly, Du Bois sketched a vision of the post-Civil War Reconstruction era far different from that offered in standard histories. While acknowledging the ineptness and even corruption of some black leaders of the era, he argued strenuously that Reconstruction represented the most democratic and progressive era in United States history. Partly this was a question of the new freedoms, including the vote, granted to black men, and of the deliberate attempt to eliminate racial distinctions in public matters. But this was not all: state and local governments of the Reconstruction period also instituted free public education and took steps toward providing health care to the poor. Once again, Du Bois borrowed from the lexicon of the radical left, initially describing the black-led government of one state as “the dictatorship of the black proletariat in South Carolina.”190 In providing a detailed account of the accomplishments of the various Reconstruction governments, Du Bois extended even further his argument that black activity was the key element determining the course of US history.
But racism did not die with slavery, and Reconstruction was replaced with the brutal, white regime later known as Jim Crow.191 How to explain the persistence of white supremacy in the post-Reconstruction era? To answer this question, Du Bois examined the interaction between black workers and white workers, and his conclusions were again contentious. Building upon his unorthodox usage of terms like “general strike” and “dictatorship of the proletariat,” he directly challenged the white left’s tendency to separate the struggles of working people—who were assumed to be white—from the black movement, before, during and after the Civil War. In particular, Black Reconstruction identified the source of this false distinction in the different treatment given to white workers and black workers after the end of Reconstruction:
It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent upon their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them.”192
These same opportunities were all systematically denied to black people on the basis of their race. Thus a sharp difference in social status existed even when black and white workers shared roughly equivalent economic circumstances. The continued existence of white supremacy was the result of the willingness of white workers, especially but not exclusively in the South, to side with their class enemies (the capitalists)
