Racial union exclusion created the very Black strikebreaker force white workers feared.

Evidence

By upholding racial segregation within their unions, white workers made their fears of being undercut by Black labor a foregone conclusion. Closing the door on Black people created a pool of available and desperate men and women who could be used to break strikes and quell unrest. Companies hired Black workers to put down labor militancy in a number of industries, replacing steelworkers, meatpackers, longshoremen, railroad hands, and garment workers. To Black workers, strikebreaking was a means to gain a foothold in the growing industrial economy and to secure opportunities long denied them. Black leaders even encouraged strikebreaking and began promoting Black workers as safe investments for industrialists. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 588

Categorization

• SEED: A self-fulfilling-prophecy mechanism — exclusionary practices producing the feared outcome — is a reusable analytic angle for essays on segregation, gatekeeping, and labor policy.