Racial Conflicts and Violence in the Labor Market: Roots in the 1919 Steel Strike

by Brown,Cliff

• ISBN13: 9780815331766
• ISBN10: 0815331762
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-09-01
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

This book focuses on community-level race relations during the 1919 Steel Strike, when intense job competition contributed to racial conflict among the nation's steel workers. As the Great Migration brought thousands of black workers to northern cities, their lower labor costs generated racially split labor markets in the industrial sector. Further, the discriminatory policies of labor unions forced many blacks to serve as strike breakers during periods of class conflict. As a result, the migration heightened racial conflict and undercut important union organizing initiatives. The 1919 Steel Strike illustrates how racial divisions crippled many American unions, a pattern that helps to explain the demise of organized labor during the 1920's. No previous studies of the 1919 Steel Strike have systematically compared community processes to determine how local events shaped the strike's outcome. Despite the failure of the 1919 Steel Strike, the varied experiences of workers in different communities revealmuch about the causes of racial conflict and the possibilities of interracial solidarity. This study finds that patterns of black migration, local government repression of labor, the organizational strength of local unions, and employers' efforts to inflame racial tension all help to explain community-level variation in interracial solidarity and conflict. (Ph. D. dissertation, Emory University, 1996; revised with new preface)

Table of Contents

Tables and Figures	ix	(2)
Acknowledgments	xi
Chapter 1 Introduction: Labor, Race, and Class Conflict in 1919	3	(14)
Chapter 2 Union Militancy and Workers' Control	17	(48)
Chapter 3 Northern Labor Markets and the Great Migration	65	(28)
Chapter 4 The 1919 Steel Strike	93	(42)
Chapter 5 Analyses of Strikebreaking, Solidarity, and Racial Violence	135	(50)
Chapter 6 Interracial Solidarity in the New Deal Years	185	(18)
Appendix	203	(4)
References	207	(14)
Index	221