449

Comfort Springs Corporation. About 30% of the three hundred workers at
Comfort Springs were African American (many of whom were women), and as soon
as the organizing drive came to light, the management resorted to tried and true
methods of race-baiting to divide the workers. The CIO, bringing in the local
National Negro Council for help, countered the racist offensive successfully, and
both Black and white workers joined the United Spring and Accessory Workers,
Local 91. When the plant was struck in October, 100 whites and 100 Blacks walked
out together and mounted picket lines. For a month an a half management held
out, and then, in December, surrendered. "

Despite the breadth of CIO activity in the various industrial sectors of the
region, the waterfront remained the hot spot for the CIO throughout 1937. The
seamen - who after May were no longer an opposition group to the AFL, but part
of a fully constituted CIO union, the NMU - kept the pressure up on the shipping
companies. There were a series of sit-down and near sit-down strikes by NMU
crews all year long. In April, the threat of a sit-down on one ship was enough to get
a settlement from the company. Most NMU sit-downs, however, resulted in a
battle. In early September, thirty-seven crewmen staged a sit-down on Bethlehem
Steel's Oakmar after it tied up at Sparrows Point. The company tried to starve the
crew out, but after five days an NMU launch got food and drink aboard the
besieged ship. Under threat of a general shipping strike to support the Oakmar
crew, the Baltimore authorities evicted the sit-down strikers by force, and the city
CIO lodged a strong protest with the city government. The NMU campaign even
took on an international dimension when, in November, 16 British seamen struck
the S.S. Summerleaf because they found it to be unseaworthy, and placed
themselves under the protection of the NMU; the required repairs to the ship were
subsequently made.

The waterfront was also the hot spot for the CIO because ClO-oriented
activity ignited activity beyond the its own ranks. In March, an aggressive