White unions’ Jim-Crow exclusion blocked interracial labor unity in the 1870s

Evidence

In the late 1860s and early 1870s, according to William Z. Foster (a historian who twice in his life headed the American Communist Party as its General Secretary), “There was much good will between the National Labour Union and the Colored National Labor Union, and if they could not establish closer working unity between Negro and white workers, this was due to their failure to overcome a number of serious obstacles. Chief among these was the NLU failure to combat the employers’ Jim Crow policies in industry. The white workers tended to oust Negro workers from the skilled trades, to refuse to work with them in the shops, and to bar them from the trade unions. This white chauvinist trend which was to wreak such havoc in the labor movement in later decades, was already manifest among unions in the NLU.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2206

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: This is an early concrete instance of the racialized split labor market that Du Bois argues caused the Depression (see para 2200).
• ADDENDUM: Relevant to ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’? No — rather it grounds the labor-race theme behind the reader’s other chapters. Closest fit: it supports the racial-causation argument Robinson builds as the tradition’s origin.

Related

• White workers excluded Blacks from skilled trades in postbellum unions (similarity 0.88)
• Postwar Northern unions expelled Black workers from skilled trades (similarity 0.80)