|
465
however, had fizzled out.
The reaction of Carl Murphy and the Afro to the Newspaper Guild drive has
led some commentators to believe that the Afro was simply a Black bourgeois
newspaper hostile to unions. However, Clarence Mitchell, in an interview many
years later, disputed this judgment, arguing that Murphy and the Afro \ve» e
consistent in their support of behind interracial and African American trade
unionism, especially the efforts of the CIO, with the exception of this one incident.
A close reading of the Afro indicates that Mitchell was right. Why the apparent
hypocrisy? The Afro's own defense was that, as a newspaper serving a poor
community, it could not afford union wages/2
One of the most remarkable drives to organize Black workers in Baltimore
in the late 1930s, however, was led not by the AFL or the CIO, but rather by
elements of the community-based Black freedom movement: those involved with
the Baltimore Urban League (BUL) under the leadership of its executive secretary
Edward Lewis. Lewis, as we have seen, had a long history of crossing the line
between the freedom movement and the labor movement in Baltimore through his
work with the ACW, the steel workers, and just about every other union that was
willing to organize Black workers. Lewis himself had worked in industry and
participated in both the Butchers' Union in Kansas City and the Musicians Union
in Chicago before coming to Baltimore. When he arrived in the city 1932, he
arrived determined to get the BUL involved in the local workers* movement for the
first time.73
In April 1938, the United States Housing Authority announced that it was
authorized to spend 15 million dollars in Baltimore; by federal statute, 4.6 per cent
of the jobs on the resulting construction projects were reserved for Black workers.
Lewis moved immediately to organize Black construction craftsmen to take
advantage of these jobs. But he had a union problem. In Baltimore in those years,
construction was dominated by the lily-white Building Trades Council, which was
|
