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of the regional CIO, the NMU and the ACW, toward the SWOC and the
IUMSWA. In fact, garments as an industry had been declining for two decades, but
with the upswing in war production concentrated in other economic sectors, the
garment industry and its unions went into a secular descent. The waterfront,
however, dramatically increased in economic importance with the war, and marine
organization increased in importance for the Baltimore CIO; however, within this
increasingly powerful sector, the balance of power moved away from the radical
NMU toward the far more conservative (if Socialist-led) IUMSWA.

Another clear trend in the CIO during 1939 worth noting - a direct
extension of the trend that clearly appeared in 1938 — was the increasing
involvement of Black workers in the movement's unions. It is commonly held that
African American workers only really moved en mass into the CIO as the CIO
increasingly broke into mass production industries after 1940. This thesis is, in fact,
largely true for Baltimore. But it is important to emphasize that the foundations
were laid for this mass influx, at least in Jim Crow Baltimore, in 1938 and 1939, as
one of the CIO's most oft-proclaimed organizing principles became more and more
an organizational fact. In addition to the Black workers already mentioned like
those involved with the steel workers and the sugar workers, the CIO in 1938 and
1939 increasingly organized Black clothing and laundry workers in the ACW and
the ILGWU, Black custodians and office workers into the United Federal Workers,
and Black newspaper workers into the Newspaper Guild.

The CIO also organized Black pin setters in bowling alleys, supported an
organizing drive among red caps at the train stations, and even announced a
campaign to organize Black waitresses; the CIO News wrote about the latter
workers: "Miserable serfdom wages as low as Si.50 a WEEK are forcing some 600
Negro girls working in Baltimore taverns and restaurants to turn to prostitution for
a living." Patrick Whalen, who served not only as head of the NMU but also as
president of the BIC in 1938, set the tone for the CIO in Baltimore by railing again