an economic constitutional order.”10 The right to unionize was at the center of this agenda.
Though today’s neoliberals generally disparage unions as “special interests,” New Dealers understood collective agitation in the workplace as a public good. Unionization enhanced consumer purchasing power and, along with entitlements, afforded dignity and security to the nation’s producer classes. This industrial democratic turn in political culture and the related rights discourse would, as I will discuss, shift the focus of African American civil rights away from narrow calls for racial equality—which basically took economic inequality as a given—toward broader demands for economic justice. New Deal industrial democracy would also encourage political militancy among black activists, who came to identify mass protest as a responsibility of citizenship.
New Deal labor law had a profound impact on the scope of African American activism during the 1930s and 1940s. Black unionists were the obvious beneficiaries of the Roosevelt administration’s efforts to enhance consumer purchasing power and workers’ rights. In 1937, for example, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) became the first African American labor union to successfully negotiate a contract with a major employer. As historian Beth Bates has argued, the BSCP’s success stemmed at least partly from the political acumen of the union’s leadership. Facing stiff opposition from a black elite dogmatically committed to clientage/petition politics, BSCP president A. Philip Randolph and his organizers framed the porters’ quest for recognition as a matter of African American civil rights. Thus, between 1925 and the start of the New Deal, the porters’ union not only established a deep base of support among blacks, but the BSCP itself helped legitimate African American protest politics.11 Still, the organizing genius of Randolph and associates notwithstanding, the BSCP owed its legal recognition to the protections afforded unions by the Norris–La Guardia Act (1932), the Railway Labor Act of 1934 and the 1935 NLRA, more commonly referred to as the Wagner Act.
The Norris–La Guardia and Wagner Acts not only played significant roles in labor disputes, they also influenced New Deal–era civil rights politics. Norris–La Guardia prevented the courts from issuing injunctions halting legitimate labor disputes, while the Wagner Act—like section 7A of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) that preceded it—enhanced workers’ rights to collective bargaining.
Together, they marked a major shift in American politics and life. In the three decades or so preceding the passage of the Wagner Act—a period known as the Lochner era—not only had the Supreme Court sanctioned employers’ use of intimidation and coercion to curb unions’ organizing campaigns, but it had also checked the government’s ability to intervene in the employer-employee relationship through the principle known as “freedom of contract.” Freedom of contract presumed that an employer and an individual employee came to the negotiating table as coequals. Taylorism should have made the absurdity of this premise plain; however, it would take the economic and political turmoil precipitated by the Great Depression to challenge the Lochner era’s employer-friendly conception of work and workplace regulations. Identifying collective bargaining as the most effective vehicle for bolstering workers’ negotiating strength with employers for more equitable wages, the NLRA’s architects—Senator Robert Wagner and his assistant, Leon Keyserling—believed that unionization was essential to stimulating consumer demand and ending the Great Depression.12 New Deal liberals likewise argued that unions held the potential to check managerial caprice by allowing workers to bargain collectively for contracts establishing formal guidelines for hiring, termination, promotions, raises and more.
To achieve its tandem goals of establishing a sustainable model of capitalism and addressing managerial authoritarianism, the Wagner Act eliminated the “yellow-dog” contract,13 established the closed shop and created the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which was responsible for mediating legitimate labor disputes.
As can be said of any institution in America, many unions—particularly in the skilled trades—were guilty of discrimination. The absence of an antidiscrimination clause from the Wagner Act thus alarmed many civil rights leaders, who feared that the closed shop would enable discriminatory unions to bar blacks from not just their collective bargaining units but the workplace itself. Nevertheless, mainstream civil rights leaders generally called for amending the NLRA rather than repealing it.
New Deal Civil Rights Activism Was Working Class
The civil rights community’s support for collective bargaining signified a notable turn in African Americans’ political sensibilities. As alluded to above, the protected status afforded labor unions both inspired and legitimated a new class-inflected militancy among African American civil rights activists. With black unemployment hovering around 50 percent in cities such as New York, Chicago and Baltimore in the early 1930s, African Americans began to mobilize protest campaigns aimed at expanding employment and housing opportunities. Working-class blacks participated in Communist Party–organized Unemployed Councils, taking to the streets both to demand jobs and to thwart evictions. They also organized “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns.
The seeds of “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” were sown in 1929, when Chicago Whip editor Joseph Bibb encouraged African American consumers to boycott businesses that relied on black patronage but refused to hire black employees. Bibb’s call resonated with African Americans shaped by both Depression-era unemployment and the race consciousness of the New Negro movement of the 1920s. Indeed, the earliest boycotts reflected a pronounced racial nationalism. Sufi Abdul Hamid’s 1932 boycott of Harlem’s Koch’s department store, for example, played on racial/ethnic tensions between blacks and Jews as well as color and class divisions among African Americans.
While Hamid briefly garnered the support of a small number of middle-class black leaders, including Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Jr., his bombastic style and anti-Semitic rhetoric quickly alienated most black elites. Hamid, who had a penchant for flowing robes and turbans, was an especially theatrical and controversial figure; nevertheless, the employment aims of early “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” protests revealed a narrow racialism that unnerved many “respectable” black leaders.14 T. Arnold Hill of the National Urban League (NUL), for example, expressed concern as early as 1930 that these campaigns might fuel racial tensions, undermining the cause of workplace integration.15
The growing popularity of “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” would eventually compel mainstream African American leaders to play active roles in the movement. As picketers benefited from both experience and a deepening pool of financial and intellectual resources, they came to frame their employment demands in accordance with New Deal labor law. In late 1933, Kiowa Costonie’s Citizens Committee characterized its boycott of A&P grocery stores in Baltimore as a labor dispute. By holding itself out as a union, the Citizens Committee hoped to gain the protections against injunction afforded strikers by the Norris–La Guardia Act. The Citizens Committee failed to persuade the courts that a legitimate labor dispute existed between its membership and A&P groceries, though, both because the group represented aspirant rather than current employees and because it demanded racial proportionalism—in other words, a quota—in employment.16 By 1938, however, the US Supreme Court’s verdict in New Negro Alliance v. Sanitary Grocery Co. would extend protection against injunctions to “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work.” The New Negro Alliance (NNA) initiated its boycott of DC’s Sanitary Grocery shops in 1936, leading the store to seek and obtain an injunction against picketers. With the aid of Howard University law professor William Hastie and sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, the New Negro Alliance eschewed calls for racial quotas in its bid for recognition as a union, focusing instead on the sociological consequences of black unemployment.
As historian Paul Moreno makes clear, the Supreme Court would ultimately rule in the NNA’s favor to ensure a broad enough interpretation of Norris–La Guardia to prevent lower courts from interpreting the act too narrowly.17
