Some postwar white labor gatherings showed genuine interracial egalitarianism

Evidence

A journalist observing the 1869 convention of the NLU wrote: “When a native Mississippian and an ex-confederate officer, in addressing a convention, refers to a colored delegate who has preceded him as ‘the gentleman from Georgia’ … when an ardent and Democratic partisan (from New York at that) declares with a rich Irish brogue that he asks for himself no privilege as a mechanic or as a citizen that he is not willing to concede to every other man, white or black … then one may indeed be warranted in asserting that time works curious charges.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2206

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: this moment of interracial possibility in the NLU/CNLU — how much did the white chauvinist trend cap it versus external forces?