Search Results

The conflicting racial and cultural values that underpin much of the Supreme Court’s decision making in civil rights cases are brought under critical review in this chapter as part of a larger argument regarding cultural diversity made in the next chapter. Thus, this chapter is a bridge between the socio-legal and socio-cultural race problems. In preparation for arguing in the next chapter that cultural diversity rides with a corpse in its cargo—to wit, cultural subordination—this chapter discusses the conflicting racial and cultural crosscurrents of the American middle class and working class. White-middle-class values, more than any other values, shape the American mainstream culture—“It’s the Middle Class, Stupid!”—wherein the problem of cultural subordination lies.

In the Funsten Nut Strike of 1933, nut shellers shut down production to protest poor working conditions and wage cuts. A group of black working-class women positioned themselves at the center of Depression-era politics through the highly publicized, Communist-organized strike against the Funsten Nut Company. Among the most influential labor battles of its era, the strike carved out a space for black women workers in the growing and increasingly powerful radical labor movement, marking the development of that movement in St. Louis.

This introductory chapter provides a background of Black Nationalism. Black Nationalism is a political philosophy that has played an integral part in African American social thought from the nineteenth century forward. There are two main threads of this philosophical tradition: classical and modern. Classical Black Nationalism is a political framework guided primarily by concerns with the creation of a sovereign Black state and uplifting and “civilizing” the race. With regards to Black Nationalist thought in the twentieth century, two moments loom large: Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in the 1910s/1920s and the Black Power Movement in the 1960s/1970s. Modern Black Nationalism is characterized by two specific shifts away from the foundational ideas that governed the classical form. It departs from its predecessor in the general lack of an explicit emphasis on an independent Black nation-state. It also shifts attention to mass culture and Black working-class life.

Cultural subordination is defined here as the suppression of important black values or folk ways—questions and concerns of keen importance to blacks—in the American mainstream culture. Like juridical subordination, cultural subordination is animated by post-Jim Crow norms that perform important rhetorical and regulatory functions in civil rights discourse—racial omission (traditionalism), racial integration (reformism), racial solidarity (limited separation), and social transformation (critical race theory). After defending the belief that blacks do have a distinct set of values that transcend class stratification, and after discussing the legitimacy of cultural diversity in American society, this chapter crafts four models of cultural diversity defined by these post-Jim Crow norms—cultural assimilation (traditionalism), biculturalism (reformism), cultural pluralism (limited separation), and transculturalism (critical race theory). It then proceeds to explain how most of these visions of cultural diversity subordinate legitimate black values. Deploying these models to purposefully enhance our racial democracy, which lies at the root of cultural diversity, can reduce (but not entirely eliminate) racial subordination in the American mainstream culture.

This chapter examines how Black working-class activism and the political ascendancy of Fiorello La Guardia created a small window of opportunity to join the FDNY that was seized by a small number of Black New Yorkers during the late 1930s and early 1940s. While relatively small, this influx of Black firefighters sparked racial backlash from the department’s overwhelming white majority, which attempted to formally institutionalize racism and racial segregation within the department. To combat this, New York’s Black firefighters formed the nation’s first Black firefighters’ organization, The Vulcan Society, in the early 1940s. The group emerged out of, and was a part of, the Black working-class oriented Black united front that developed in New York during the 1930s and early 1940s. Like similar Black labor organizations of the time, the Vulcan Society joined workplace and community-based struggles, and successfully mobilized to prevent the formal segregation of the FDNY.

Chapter 5 analyzes the initial rocky years of black working-class women’s entry into the needle trades, boot and shoe, and laundry factories and their unions during the early to mid-1940s. Black working-class women exposed the fault lines of the American racial liberalism espoused by civil rights and union progressives who worked to establish “interracial good-will” in unionism and the industrial workforce. Women’s resistance on the shop floor and in the union hall, demanding respect and fairness, challenged and altered community leaders’ programs. Black working-class women were less interested in breaking the color barrier than in earning fair wages, establishing fair standards, organizing work hours around other commitments, and working and organizing in a hospitable climate. Focusing on black women’s work with the ILGWU, this chapter examines their work and union experiences in the union’s worker theater program to consider why conflicts over historical memory; black women workers’ long demands for dignity, autonomy, and respect; and social reformers’ interracial experiments produced intense battles.

Chapter 6 uncovers the links between jobs and public housing. From the vantage point of overlooked historical actors, the chapter examines the massive urban renewal programs that razed black working-class neighborhoods and constructed massive public-housing structures throughout the city. The dignity for which black working-class women struggled pointed to a cluster of trenchant urban problems that St. Louis began encountering in the prewar period and later experienced in much more concentrated fashion. This chapter highlights the lives of public housing tenants and the labor activism of Ora Lee Malone to examine black women’s struggles against urban inequality. It also shows how black middle-class women reformers used their platforms to advance black working-class women’s causes. The work of the women featured in this chapter directly led to the 1969 rent strike, in which public-housing tenants struck against the St. Louis Housing Authority. In one of the first and largest rent stoppages in the nation, strike participants made tenant control a centerpiece of their platform.

Black women’s failed attempts to abandon domestic employment for jobs in the lucrative local defense industry became a central mobilizing agenda around which organizers of the March on Washington movement waged their wartime black freedom struggle. Women aired personal stories of employment discrimination before committees, filed affidavits against large industrial plants, joined picket lines, shared their grievances through letter writing, gave public addresses at large mass meetings, and formed their own civil rights organizations. The narrative that black working-class women activists astutely and persuasively articulated—namely, that of the beleaguered black woman worker excluded from participation in patriotic service—provided a most effective assault on discrimination, exposing the jagged lines of the wartime American democratic practice. Women’s labor activism proved indispensable to the formation of one of the largest and most active March on Washington movement chapters in the country.

Chapter 2 maps the labor activism of St. Louis’s largest segment of black working-class women as they mounted a labor reform program that anticipated and challenged New Deal labor legislation. With progressive black women staffers who led the St. Louis Urban League’s Women’s Division and progressive Jewish clubwomen who developed important ties to black communities, domestic workers designed and enforced standardization and rationalization policies to make dignity tangible in their contractual agreements. A predominant female constituency marked the Urban League as a women’s organization during a “radical” phase that extended into the late 1940s. As domestic workers made moves to “industrialize” household labor, they laid the groundwork for black women’s economic battles during the World War II period.

The short-lived though influential Colored Clerks’ Circle (CCC) was a black youth organization that used boycotts and picket lines to win jobs at drugstores located in black communities. Formed in 1937, the CCC combined black self-determination, notions of economic nationalism, and consumer power to address the unemployment crisis plaguing black youths. Instead of conceptualizing black economic power through the figure of the black housewife, a method employed by the St. Louis Housewives’ League in the early 1930s, the CCC positioned politically actualized black young women as facilitators of racial leadership and racial progress. Moreover, CCC members made the argument that community change became evident and meaningful when young black women found dignity through employment.