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relatively affluent among Black workers) or pride of craft (in any objective
assessment their work did take great skill), but from the fact that they had the
power to resist the slights of whites and to retaliate for discrimination. In 1929,
Secretary J.F. Barry of Local 858 told investigators that "he found it distasteful to
support the union label when Negroes could not get into scores of organizations."
And Local 858 acted on this sentiment. When the local was remodeling its offices
and found that the AFL building trades unions would not send it Black tradesmen,
it defied the BFL and hired nonunion Black bricklayers and carpenters. Then in
1930, when, during a BFL debate on daylight savings, representatives of the white
unions insisted on segregated seating, the Black ILA representatives walked out of
not only the meeting but the BFL itself; white ILA leaders followed them in

solidarity. On the eve of the Great Depression, few Black workers — or Blacks of

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any class — were in a position to stand up so successfully to white racism.

The final point to be made about the Black trade-union tradition is that,
despite the fact that Black women made up a remarkably large portion of the
working class, this tradition and its institutions were very largely male. There was
no organization among the personal service workers, the category that included the
vast majority of working Black women. The Black community nationally and in
Baltimore was not ignorant of this fact. Several efforts had been made in a number
of locales to organize domestic workers, and in Baltimore the Afro-American had
on a number of occasions called attention to the need of these workers for
organization and regulatory protection. Whatever organizing attempts were made
in Baltimore prior to the Crash, though, they failed to overcome the debilitatingly
atomized and paternalistic conditions under which Black female domestic workers
labored.