Goals, Values Bond Labor, Civil Rights Movements

The labor movement has a long history of fighting for civil rights for all Americans and human rights worldwide. Despite major victories over the last 50 years, there is still hard work to do. Unions continue to be at the forefront of the fight for fairness on issues that include immigration, fair trade and workplace equality. NAACP Chairman Julian Bond discussed the alliance between labor and civil rights activists, past and present, in a speech to the 2005 AFL-CIO convention. What follows are excerpts.

 By Julian Bond, NAACP Chairman

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.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, most labor unions excluded blacks. 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.

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.

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.

In 1961, when Martin Luther King Jr., addressed the AFL-CIO's Fourth Constitutional Convention, 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….The duality of interests of labor and Negroes 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."

Now, as we stand on the threshold of the 21st 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 non-white Americans face restrictions more difficult to attack than in the years that went before.

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.

They're attacking Social Security. They want private charity to replace government's helping hand. They've outsourced thousands and thousands of jobs. They've gone after labor unions, making it harder for workers to organize.

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.

More than 40 years ago, a coalition of progressive forces brought justice to the segregated South. That coalition can shape public policy once again.

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.

The interests of minorities and labor are inevitably bound together; as Martin Luther King said, "When you are cut, we bleed."