435

in overwhelming white East Baltimore, both Thurgood Marshall and the national
secretary of the NNC, John P. Davis spoke.

As was the case in the early 1930s, however, organizing steel in the
Baltimore region toward the end of the decade was tough going. According to
historian and journalist Mark Reutter, after six months only about 3,000 of the
15,500 workers at Sparrows Point had joined SWOC - a big increase over the 400
or so members the Amalgamated claimed a year previously, but not enough to put
steel on the cutting edge of the CIO in the region. Nationally SWOCs carefully
planned and administered leadership of the CIO effort was preempted by the
popular upsurge in auto that resulted in the wave of sit-down strikes centered in
Flint, Michigan, and that established the United Auto Workers as one of the CIO's
most energetic unions. By the end of 1936, SWOC efforts in Baltimore were also
overshadowed, not in this case by auto workers, but by another sector of the local
working class with a powerful local tradition of struggle. On November 1, 1936, the
seamen in the port of Baltimore went on strike.

The seamen's strike of 1936-37 - the 100-Day Strike that I. Duke Avnet
referred to in his testimony above — was not, formally speaking, a CIO effort.
Rather it was the work of insurgent forces in the AFL International Seamen's
Union (ISU) that were convergent with the CIO. The strike, which rapidly
encompassed all the major Atlantic and Gulf ports, was called with three
interlocking objectives. First it was a solidarity strike with the walkout on the West
Coast of 37,000 marine workers led by Harry Bridges and the ILA insurgents or the
1934 West Coast strike. Secondly, it was a strike against the ISU leadership that
had, without consulting the union membership, completed agreements with the
shipping companies; when these agreements were repudiated by rank-and-file
votes, the ISU leadership refused to back out of them. Thirdly, it was a strike
agaiitet the shipping companies for a decent contract. Underlying these three