I received this invitation with a great deal of pleasure.
I am delighted to be here because I know the mutual benefits that grew from the historic alliance between organized labor and the movement for civil rights – benefits we all must work to strengthen and extend today.
Before I start, however, I’d like to personally thank President John Sweeney for this invitation.
I’ll tell you a story about him – I told it when he spoke to the NAACP Convention’s Labor Lunch two weeks ago. Some years ago I was invited to speak to the annual convention of the United Auto Workers in Las Vegas. Because I was vacationing in Minnesota, this would be a quick day trip – fly to Las Vegas, make my speech, and fly out. But when I got back to the Las Vegas airport, my flight was canceled, and I was stuck, without even enough cash for a cab ride back into town. Desperate, I looked around the crowded terminal and I saw two men who I thought just might help me if I asked. One was Steve Forbes, the rich businessman then running for President; the other was John Sweeney.
Who was going to lend me enough money to get back to town?
Would it be the multi-billionaire plutocrat, the son of privilege, the promoter of the flat tax? Or would it be the leader of the American movement of working women and men?
I made the right decision, I asked John Sweeney for a loan, he gave it to me, and I didn’t have to spend the night in the Las Vegas airport.
And, I paid him back.
I’d be remiss if I also didn’t thank organized labor for its consistent support of the NAACP’s work over the years – you’ve been a good friend in fair weather and foul, and we are deeply appreciative.
I’ve had two union cards in my wallet during my working life and have one there now. And I am proud to serve on the board of American Rights at Work, formed to insure American working women and men have the right to organize unions and bargain collectively with their employers.
There has never been a time when representatives of organized labor did not serve on the NAACP’s Board of Directors or in our leadership.
Helping me to govern the NAACP today are Richard Womack, Assistant to President Sweeney; Bill Lucy, Secretary Treasurer of AFSCME; Clayola Brown, International Vice-President of UNITE/HERE; Annie B. Martin, a member of the Executive Board of the New York City Labor Council; Nate Gooden of the UAW and Charles Smith of NEA.
The unions I’ve mentioned aren’t the only ones which support the work we do to strengthen our democracy – we are proud to list many, many others as fellow soldiers over many years in the on-going fight for human rights.
In 1961, when Martin Luther King, Jr., addressed your Fourth Constitutional Convention in Bal Harbour, Florida, he spoke of the “unity of purpose” between the labor movement and the movement for civil rights. He said:
“Our needs are identical with labor’s needs: decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children and respect in the community. That is why Negroes support labor’s demands and fight laws which curb labor. That is why the labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth. The duality of interests of labor and Negroes [King said] makes any crisis which lacerates you a crisis from which we bleed. As we stand on the threshold of the second half of the twentieth century, a crisis confronts us both.1
Now, as we stand on the threshold of the twenty-first century, a crisis confronts us once again.
It is a crisis for the freedom movement and a crisis for the movement of working women and men.
Despite impressive increases in the numbers of black people holding public office, despite our ability now to sit and eat and ride and vote and attend school in places that used to bar black faces, in some important ways nonwhite Americans face restrictions more difficult to attack than in the years that went before.
The current leadership of the House and Senate is as hostile to civil rights as any in recent memory – on a report card prepared by the NAACP, they fail!
We are part of a progressive coalition in America that over decades created a truly compassionate government. It introduced Social Security and protection for workers. It helped outlaw racial discrimination. It made preservation of the environment a national priority. It gave Americans access to the courts when calamity struck and redress was required. All this and more came about because a coalition of the concerned worked together and voted together to make the benefits of our democracy extend to all.
But in recent years, in a stealthy, devious campaign, the enemies of justice and fair play have whittled away at the components of the progressive coalition. They’ve promoted deeply flawed economic and foreign policies. They’ve passed tax cuts that were not only unfair but unaffordable.
Ideas of government that were marginal, even delusional, have moved to center stage. The wacky has become the reality, the unimaginable is now taken for everyday truth.
How did they do it? How did they make political hay from barnyard straw?
They did it by coupling ostentatious piety with a victim mentality. They quoted Martin Luther King and misused his message, all the while profiting from a supine press. They reinforced their message by harnessing a round-the-clock perpetual motion attack machine and echo chamber.
And some Democrats won’t take their own side in a fight.
They’ve restricted access to the courts, capped damages for even the most egregious practices, eviscerated class action lawsuits, and not coincidentally, shielded industry after industry from legal scrutiny.
They’ve tried an aggressive campaign to seduce black clergy and create a brand new political party, whose initials are F-B-G-P. That stands for the Faith Based Grant Party. Their hope is to create an alliance of the neo-cons and the theo-cons, all tied together by federal cash.
They’re attacking Social Security, the underpinning of every American’s dream of retirement free from need and want.
They want private charity to replace government’s helping hand, substituting faith-based organizations free to discriminate and proselytize for the fairness and secularism required of the public sector. They offer America a challenge – do we want to fight social inequality through the common power of a democratic government accountable to all the people, or will we pass off the problems of the poor and neglected to the church and the Salvation Army?
They’ve outsourced thousands and thousands of jobs; now they’re even outsourcing torture, sending suspects to foreign lands.2
Their budget is bush. It gives us the real meaning of the “ownership society” – a society where you’re on your own. “They’re waging class war from the top down, literally taking food from the mouths of poor children and giving more largess to millionaires.”3
They’re practicing trickle-down economics, and I’m tired of it trickling on me.
They profess to being true believers, but they are really true deceivers.
They’ve gone after labor unions, making it harder for workers to organize, forbidding Transportation Security Administration employees the right to collectively bargain for better pay and better working conditions.
Labor unions’ membership has plummeted – from 35% of workers in the 1950’s to about 12% of the work force today. In 1974 the average American CEO made 34 times as much as the average American worker. That was bad enough; now, it is more than 220 times as much – recalling the bitter words of Victor Hugo that there was always more misery in the lower classes than there was humanity in the upper classes.
Today, a significant portion of our population faces permanent privation, with the percentage in poverty going up.
We are today the most economically stratified of all industrial nations, the gap between rich and poor larger than in Britain, Italy, Germany, Canada, France, Finland – larger here and growing faster here than anywhere else.
And for those workers whose skins are black or brown, the gap is greater and the prospects bleaker. Today the net financial assets of black families in which one member has a post graduate degree are lower than white families in which the highest level of education achieved is graduation from elementary school.
But we know black union members make 29% more than their unorganized and unrepresented counterparts, and are 28% more likely to have health insurance.
Economic security creates a climate in which social justice prospers; economic stagnation breeds an environment of political scapegoating and social hostility.
Former President Clinton told us the new global economy “contains within it the seeds of new disruptions, new instabilities, new inequalities, new threats.”
Those threats – to working women and men – are real.
The new global economy allows employers maximum flexibility while providing record-breaking profits. Workers, meanwhile, are treated as mere commodities – valued only in terms of the bottom line and left at the bottom of the economic ladder. Corporations act globally – jumping across borders from country to country and continent to continent, looking for the most compliant climate in which to ply their trade – while their high-priced lobbyists patrol the corridors of power pushing policies like NAFTA, CAFTA and GATT.
As factories move south of the border, good jobs go with them. Capital travels around the world with the blink of an eye. And in that blink, more than jobs and wages are lost – families slip from comfort into poverty, communities begin to erode, dreams fade and then they die.
Here at home, Stewart Acuff reminds us, more than 20,000 workers were fired or discriminated against for union activities, according to the NLRB. That’s one worker being penalized or fired every 26 minutes for expressing his or her basic right to join a union. That’s because our labor laws are so weak that employers routinely break them.4
More than 40 years ago, a coalition of progressive forces brought justice to the segregated South. That same coalition created the New Deal this callous Congress has tried to repeal.
That coalition can shape public policy once again.
The NAACP joined with labor to defeat California’s misnamed Payroll Protection Act, known as Proposition 226, which would have tied labor’s hands in electoral campaigns. Labor relied on those time-tested techniques of organization and mobilization – and about $20 million dollars.
Early polls said Proposition 226 would pass by a 2 to 1 landslide; instead, it was defeated by a margin of 53 to 47 percent. The mobilization was so effective that nearly two of every five voters were union members. Plans by reactionaries to place similar initiatives on ballots in other states were abandoned.
The NAACP has also worked to change attitudes, laws and institutions for the good of all Americans.
We believed at our founding 96 years ago – and we believe now – that an integrated society where race and ethnicity distinguish but do not divide us is the society we want, for ourselves and our children after us. We also want a society where people are fairly compensated for the hard work they do. Where those who have don’t run roughshod over the less fortunate.
We want a society that bends toward compassion, not toward ruthlessness; toward cooperation not competition; a society that is committed to the true American dream.
For decades we have been fighting for the rights of working men and women. Through years and years of slavery and subjugation, we had been the victims of gross racial capitalism – the suppression of our rights and the exploitation of our labor.
We protested against segregating mail clerk railroad jobs in 1914. In 1919, we met with the Executive Council of the AFL to complain about segregated jobs and segregated unions.
From the early 1920s on, we fought against the systematic removal – by terror and murder – of black firemen from southern trains.
In 1930, we joined with organized labor to keep racist, anti-labor Judge John J. Parker off the Supreme Court.
We cheered the UAW in the late 1930s when it demanded an end to discrimination in plants where its members worked. But when workers at the Packard plant in Detroit went on strike in 1943 to protest hiring black workers, we fought the UAW.
We fought against exclusion and segregated locals in the musicians’ union.
Over the years, we fought beside – and sometimes we fought against – organized labor to win a fair deal for black workers.
In 1960 we fought the exclusion of black longshoremen from the Brooklyn docks and the complete lockout of black electricians from the union in Washington, DC. We fought against racial exclusion in the Plumbers, Bricklayers, Sheet Metal Workers, Glass Workers, Tile Setters, Machinists and Ornamental and Structural Workers Unions.
A few years ago we opposed another lockout – the lockout of workers, most of them black, by Crown Petroleum.
Given our common interests, minority Americans and organized labor are both better off when we cooperate. Most of us are working people. Our interests and your interests are the same.
Our common history tells us there have long been hopes for cooperation between black and white workers.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most labor unions excluded blacks. Unorganized blacks were used as scabs when white unionists went on strike. The old divide-and-conquer strategy was put to good use by corporate bosses. The labor movement’s racism was used against it to great effect.
Things began to change when A. Philip Randolph organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in the 1920s. Blacks scored a major breakthrough in the struggle for admission to the ranks of organized labor in 1930 when the AFL recognized the Brotherhood.
The NAACP organized a Labor Division in 1949 that continues its work today.
Twenty five years earlier, in 1924, the NAACP helped create the Interracial Labor Commission. Its goal was to bring more Blacks into the labor movement. It worked. Thousands of black workers joined the ranks of the organized rank-and-file in the ensuing years as widespread discrimination began to fall, and they quickly became some of labor’s most disciplined and dedicated foot soldiers, infusing the movement with renewed energy and vigor.
In many organizing campaigns in the 1930s and 1940s, especially in the South, black workers were the first to join, were the most steadfast and the most militant. This was true of campaigns to organize longshoremen along the Mississippi River, in ports of the Gulf of Mexico and on the Eastern Atlantic Coast, and in largely black mining regions in Alabama and West Virginia.
The passage of the Wagner Act in 1935 and the formation of the Committee for Industrial Organization that same year gave all workers collective bargaining rights and gave black workers an alternative to the racially restrictive union practices.
Five years later there were 210,000 blacks in the CIO, and its total membership was larger than the AFL.
In 1946, with the labor movement struggling with nationwide strikes, the NAACP voted to:
“immediately support the Electric Workers, Packinghouse Workers and … other strikers and urge our Branches to take up collections to make these strikes more effective.
One of our founders, W. E. B. DuBois, was using his widely read newspaper column to help shape black public opinion in support of unions. He hammered away for the union cause with column after column backing one strike after another.
As he put it: “every American Negro ought to stand in back of the strikes, [and] give them support and sympathy.”
Many ties bind labor and minority Americans. The first President of the Negro Labor Council, founded in 1950 to fight racism in the ranks of organized labor, was William R. Hood, recording secretary of UAW Local 600 – at that time, the largest local in the world. When the Rev. Martin Luther King was arrested in 1961 on bogus charges, the UAW contributed $40,000 toward his bail.
In 1961, King spoke about the common heritage of unionists and civil rights activists. He said then:
“Perhaps few people can so well understand the problems of [auto] workers and others in labor as Negroes themselves because we built a cotton economy for 300 years as slaves on which the nation grew powerful, and we still lack the most elementary rights of citizens and workers. We too realize that when human beings are subordinated to blind economic forces, human beings can become human scrap.”
King invited the UAW’s Walter Reuther to join him at the historic March on Washington in August, 1963. In a spirited speech that day, Reuther was uncompromising in support of the freedom movement. He declared:
“We cannot defend freedom in Berlin so long as we deny freedom in Birmingham! … If we fail, the vacuum of our failure will be filled by the apostles of hatred who will search for answers in the dark of night, …, and brotherhood will yield to bitterness and bloodshed and we will tear asunder the fabric of American society.
In 2003, black workers made up 16.5% of the unionized workforce, a greater percentage than their portion in the population. Numerous studies show that blacks, particularly black women, are more likely to vote pro-union in certification elections than their non-black counterparts. Union membership is higher among blacks than and, within all demographic groups, black men continue to have the highest union membership rate.
So while once blacks couldn’t get a union card, today they and other minorities are disproportionately represented in terms of the total American population. Polls show that when asked, 77% of blacks say they’d join a union; only 49% of whites say the same.
Union membership and the union card mean a great deal. In 2003, the average non-union black worker earned $491 a week, while the average earnings of blacks who were union members were $665. That’s like a 35% paycheck bonus.
Beside higher wages, that card means better health insurance, pensions, paid vacation time, sick leave and other on-the-job safeguards.
It also means protection against unfair treatment, helping to level the playing field between employer and employee.
Let me quote from the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Jr., from a speech he made at the NAACP convention just two weeks ago. He said then:
“Hotel workers in New York earn $17 dollars an hour, with health benefits and retirement plans. Hotel workers in Louisiana or Atlanta make $7 an hour with no benefits or retirement plans. Bally’s workers in Las Vegas make $40,000, yet in Tunica, Mississippi just $20,000. That’s the difference between right-to-work versus right-to-organize and be protected and represented by unions.”
Organized labor’s agenda helps non-unionized blacks too. A high percentage of blacks are minimum wage and low-wage job holders. Labor fights for them when it fights for a raise in the minimum wage; that’s why the NAACP has endorsed the call for an increase and why we’ve supported legislation that will boost the present, inadequate minimum wage.
Union representation helps all non-unionized workers too. At Costco, where only 19% of workers are unionized, union representation creates a ripple effect that helps set standards in all stores. “The agreements lock in wage and benefit packages that are the highest in the grocery and (discount) retail business,” the Teamsters’ negotiator said.
The labor movement can also take credit for laws which protect workers’ health and safety, make their pensions more secure, create an appeals process for workplace grievances and help workers in many other ways.
Minority Americans have better lives because of labor’s struggles. Labor supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1988 and the Civil Rights Act of 1991. We know labor will be with us when we fight for renewal of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The interests of minorities and labor are inevitably bound together; as Martin Luther King said, when you are cut, we bleed.
When labor reaches out its hand to racial minorities, labor and minorities win. When either turns its back on the other, each loses, America loses. We all lose.
We ought to remember that black Americans – like organized labor – didn’t just march to freedom. As you did to win recognition, fair pay and decent working conditions, we worked and fought our way to civil rights through the difficult business of organizing: registering voters, one by one; creating community support, block by block; financing the cause of social justice, dollar by dollar; creating an interracial coalition, nationwide.
Yesterday’s civil rights movement succeeded because the victims became their own best champions. When Rosa Parks refused to stand up, when Martin Luther King stood up to speak, mass participation came to the movement for civil rights.
In the same way, the labor movement was built on sacrifice, hard work and organizing.
We must all get back to the difficult business of organizing and creating coalitions.
When I entered the labor force more than five decades ago, there were five workers making contributions into the social security system for every retiree. There’s no way to know who my five were, but their names could easily have been Carl, Ralph, Bob, Steve and Bill.
When I retire, there will be only three workers paying into the system for every retiree. Their names may well be Kwanza, Maria and Jose.
America needs to insure – we need to insure – that they have the best education, the best health care, the best jobs, and the best futures we possibly can.
Martin Luther King isn’t the only soldier missing from the Freedom Fight. He didn’t march from Selma to Montgomery by himself; he didn’t speak to an empty field at the March on Washington. There were thousands marching with him and before him, and thousands more who did the dirty work that preceded the triumphant march.
If there were thousands then, there need to be thousands more now.
We are the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and we believe colored people come in all colors. Anyone who supports our values is more than welcome.
We move forward fastest when we move forward together – we can’t afford to leave a single soul behind.
Where there are others who share our condition and concern, we intend to make common cause with them.
My slave-born grandfather’s words – from the last century – might well be remembered here. He said in 1892:
“The pessimist from his corner looks out upon the world of wickedness and sin and blinded by all that is good or hopeful in the condition and progress of the human race, bewails the present state of affairs and predicts woeful things for the future.”
“In every cloud he beholds a destructive storm, in every flash of lightning an omen of evil, and in every shadow that falls across his path a lurking foe.”
“But he forgets that clouds also bring life and hope, that lightning purifies the atmosphere, and shadow and darkness prepare for sunshine and growth, and that hardships and adversity nerve the race, as the individual, for greater efforts and grander victories.”5
Greater efforts and grander victories. That was the promise his generation, born in slavery, made more than 100 years ago. That was the promise made by the generation that won the great world war for democracy five decades ago. That was the promise made by the generation that brought democracy to America’s darkest corners three decades ago, and that is the promise we must all seek to honor today.
(Julian Bond is a Distinguished Professor in the School of Government at the American University in Washington, DC and a Professor in History at the University of Virginia. In February 1998, he was elected Chairman of the NAACP Board of Directors.)
1. Martin Luther King, Jr., Address before the Constitutional Convention, AFL-CIO, Bal Harbour, Fla., December 11, 1961.
2. “Torture, American Style,” Bob Herbert, New York Times (February 11, 2005).
3. Paul Krugman, “Bush’s Class War Budget,” New York Times (February 12, 2004).
4. Stewart Acuff, “Fighting for Unions,” the Nation, April 18, 2005
5. Bond, James, “Commencement Address,” Berea College Reporter, June, 1892, Berea, Kentucky.
Copyright 2005 by Julian Bond
