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accept. Given the near impossibility of integrated organization, some Black
workers began to see positive good in separation. Black federal employees came to
feel that "since their problems were peculiar to their own group, a separate local
would be better". And Sterling D. Spero and Abram L. Harris were told by Black
Baltimore longshoremen "that they prefer separation. It gives them an experience
in union government and office-holding that they claim they cannot receive in a
mixed local." The Black trade-union tradition in Baltimore was not in origin
separatist, but in the age of advancing Jim Crow and of Marcus Garvey, at least
CO
some Black trade unionists came to see virtue in necessity.
The relationship between the predominantly Black locals of predominantly
white unions and their white union brethren was variable, though largely negative.
The Station Employees Association and the Culinary Alliance were affiliates of
white locals of the Brotherhood of Railway Clerks Union and the Cooks and
Waiters Union, respectively; in these unions the Black locals had limited control of
their own affairs. The International Hod Carriers, while a large, important,
predominantly Black (more than 70%) local in its own right, had white leadership.
The skilled white workers in AFL building trade unions — especially the Bricklayers
- would often employ white non-union hod carriers rather than Black union hod
carriers. The Black local of the American Federation of Musicians, having fully
separated from the white local after a dispute over the 1918 labor day parade, was
suppose to have its own "territory"; in reality it suffered constant intrusions from the
white union musicians.
On the other hand, the two Black locals of the Federal Employees Union
reputedly had amicable relations with the white locals from which they formerly
split. The leader of a Black local represented all of the Baltimore locals at the 1931
national convention. Also, the locals of Freight Handlers and Station Employees
(numbering as many as 700 Black workers in 1923) were federal locals organized
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