An valuable 1913 essay by Du Bois from ‘New Review’, of which he would become an editor, on the previous one hundred years of history of the U.S. socialist and labor movements’ relationship to Black workers and racial oppression.

‘A Field for Socialists’ by W.E.B. Du Bois from New Review. Vol. 1 No. 2. January 11, 1913.

There is a group of ten million persons in the United States toward whom Socialists would better turn serious attention.

These people belong to the working class predominantly of the four or more millions of them who are adult workers less than a million could in any way be called capitalists, and the capital of most of these consists of small farms which they work themselves. The rest of the group is composed of two million common laborers, a half million servants and washerwomen, and a half million more or less skilled laborers with a few highly skilled workers, including fifty thousand professional men.

Because these persons are descendants of African slaves brought into the United States between 1619 and 1863, and emancipated from physical slavery in the latter year, they are the most thoroughly exploited class in the United States. They are not only exploited by individuals and corporations, but they are, to an extent unheard of in other American groups, exploited by the state with the consent of a widely organized public opinion.

Here, then, is a laboring class which no labor movement can afford to neglect. Both their actual numbers and their distribution geographically and by occupations make them of great importance. A labor movement without them in the Southern South is unthinkable, and the Southern South will be the greatest sphere of capitalist development in the United States after the opening of the Panama Canal. A labor movement without them in border states like Kentucky, Maryland, or Missouri, and in the southern part of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois can never be successful save in those industries where few or no Negroes are employed. In the northern cities the Negro is a small but growing factor. He may, therefore, be ignored or forgotten in most industries, but there are lines of work where even there he must be recognized. The waiters, the teamsters, the laundry workers, the barbers and even the steel workers and building trades have more or less roughly been made to realize this.

How have these facts been met in the past? They have been met by a determined effort to leave the American Negro out of the labor movement. This effort had its seeds naturally in the con tempt of free workers for slaves. The laborer who hated slave labor was thoughtlessly led to hate the slave, and in new free labor states like Kansas and California, in early days, the laws against Negroes were as severe as the laws against slavery.

This inborn tendency found further justification in the fact that the freed Negro, having worked formerly for nothing, was delighted on emancipation to work for almost nothing. This lowered the general level of wages in sections and communities, and everywhere in certain lines of work. The wrath of the laborers was forthwith directed not against the low wages and the men who paid them, but virulently against the men who received them.

These poor black workers merited no such anger. They accepted low wages because the low wages were higher than any they had ever received before. They knew nothing of the struggle of wage slaves for a higher wage; they did not know the A.B.C. of agitation. To meet this situation two paths were open to the working-class: to educate this new free working class up to the plain of demanding a living wage, or to ignore them and to try and organize the working class along the color line.

First the labor movement in the United States tried more or less sincerely the broader and worthier method.

The Evans brothers, who came from England as labor agitators about 1825, put among their twelve demands: “10th. Abolition of chattel slavery and of wage slavery.” From 1840 to 1850 labor reformers were, in many cases, earnest abolitionists; as one of them said in 1847:

In my opinion the great question of labor, when it shall come up, will be found paramount to all others, and the operatives of New England, peasants of Ireland and laborers of South America will not be lost sight of in sympathy for the Southern slave.

“Indeed the anti-slavery agitation and the organization of the mechanics of the United States kept pace with each other; both were revolutionary in their character and although the agitators differed in their methods, the ends in view were the same, viz., the freedom of the man who worked.”

Along with this movement went, nevertheless, many labor disturbances which had economic causes, especially the series of riots in Philadelphia from 1829 until after the war, when the Negroes suffered greatly at the hands of white workingmen. The Civil War with its attendant evils bore heavily on the laboring classes, and led to widespread agitation and various attempts at organization.

In New York City, especially, the draft was felt to be unjust by laborers because the wealthy could buy exemption for $300. A feeling of disloyalty to the Union and bitterness toward the Negro arose. A meeting was called in Tammany Hall and Greeley ad dressed them. Longshoremen and railroad employees struck at times and assaulted non-unionists. In New York Negroes took the places of longshoremen and were assaulted.

After the war attempts to unite all workingmen and to federate the trade unions were renewed, and following the influence of the Emancipation Proclamation a more liberal tone was adopted toward black men. On August 19, 1866, the National Labor Union said in its declaration:

“In this hour of the dark distress of labor, we call upon all laborers of whatever nationality, creed or color, skilled or unskilled, trades unionists and those now out of the union, to join hands with us and each other to the end that poverty and all its attendant evils shall be abolished forever.”

On August 19, 1867, the National Labor Congress met at Chicago, Ill. There were present a large number of delegates from the states of North Carolina, Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri. The president, Z.C. Whatley, in his report said, among other things:

“The emancipation of the slaves has placed us in a new position, and the question now arises, What labor position shall they now occupy? They will begin to learn and to think for themselves, and they will soon resort to mechanical pursuits and thus come in contact with white labor. It is necessary that they should not undermine it, therefore the best thing that they can do is to form trade unions, and thus work in harmony with the whites.”

It was not, however, until the organization of the Knights of Labor that workingmen began effective cooperation. The Knights of Labor was founded in Philadelphia in 1869 and held its first national convention in 1876. It was for a long time a secret organization, but it is said that from the first it recognized no distinctions of “race, creed or color.”

Nevertheless admission must in all cases be subject to a vote of the local assembly where the candidate applied, and at first it required but three black balls to reject an applicant. This must have kept Northern Negroes out pretty effectively in most cases. On the other hand, the shadow of black competition began to loom on the horizon. Most people expected it very soon, and the Negro exodus of 1879 gave widespread alarm to labor leaders in the North. Evidence of labor movements in the South, too, gradually appeared and in 1880 the Negroes of New Orleans struck for a dollar a day, but were suppressed by the militia.

Such considerations led many trade unions, notably the iron and steel workers and the cigar makers, early in the eighties, to remove “white” from their membership restrictions and leave admittance open to Negroes at least in theory. The Knights of Labor also began proselyting in the South and by 1885 were able to report from Virginia:

“The Negroes are with us heart and soul, and have organized seven assemblies in this city (Richmond) and one in Manchester with a large membership.”

So, too, the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners said about 1886 that they had Negro unions as far South as New Orleans and Galveston:

“In the Southern States the colored men working at the trades have taken hold of the organization with avidity, and the result is the Brotherhood embraces 14 unions of colored carpenters in the South.”

The Knights of Labor, after a brilliant career, began to decline owing to internal dissensions. Coincident with the decline of the Knights of Labor came a larger and more successful movement, The American Federation of Labor.

The attitude of the American Federation of Labor may be summed up as having passed through the following stages:

1. The working people must unite and organize irrespective of creed, color, sex, nationality or politics. This was an early declaration, but was not embodied in the constitution. It was reaffirmed in 1897, after opposition. Bodies confining membership to whites were barred from affiliation.

2. Separate charters may be issued to Central Labor Unions, Local Unions or Federal Labor Unions composed exclusively of colored members. This was adopted by the convention of 1902 and recognized the legality of excluding Negroes from local unions, city central labor bodies, etc.

3. A National Union which excludes Negroes expressly by constitutional provision may affiliate with the A.F.L. No official announcement of this change of policy has been made, but the fact is well known in the case of the Railway Track men, Telegraphers, and others.

4. A National Union already affiliated with the A.F.L. may amend its laws so as to exclude Negroes.

This was done by the Stationary Engineers at their Boston convention in 1902, and since by other unions. The A.F.L. has taken no public action in these cases.

The net result of all this has been to convince the American Negro that his greatest enemy is not the employer who robs him, but his white fellow workingman. For thirty years, he has been taught this lesson by the working man himself: between 1881 and 1900, fifty strikes occurred in the United States against the employment of Negroes, and probably twice that number really against Negroes, but ostensibly against non-union men, when in reality the Negro was not permitted to join the union.

The Socialist party must know and heed this history. The Negro workingman is daily increasing in efficiency. Small Negro capitalists are arising. The whole trend of thought among Negroes is for the reasons given and other reasons, distinctly capitalistic. The employing class has given huge sums of money wrung from underpaid white laborers to furnish Negro schools and other institutions, which the States controlled largely by the white laborers’ vote refused to furnish. Small wonder that the average Negro can be counted on as the solid unwavering ally of capitalistic government and looks on strike breaking as a more than justifiable blow to his enemies.

Facing such a situation what has Socialism to say to these black men? Is it going to ignore them, or segregate them, or complain because they do not forthwith adopt a program of a revolution of which they know nothing or a movement which they are not invited to join?’

New Review was a New York-based, explicitly Marxist, sometimes weekly/sometimes monthly theoretical journal begun in 1913 and was an important vehicle for left discussion in the period before World War One. In the world of the Socialist Party, it included Max Eastman, Floyd Dell, Herman Simpson, Louis Boudin, William English Walling, Moses Oppenheimer, Walter Lippmann, William Bohn, Frank Bohn, John Spargo, Austin Lewis, WEB DuBois, Maurice Blumlein, Anton Pannekoek, Elsie Clews Parsons, and Isaac Hourwich as editors and contributors. Louis Fraina played an increasing role from 1914 on, leading the journal in a leftward direction as New Review addressed many of the leading international questions facing Marxists. The journal folded in June, 1916 for financial reasons. Its issues are a formidable archive of pre-war US Marxist and Socialist discussion.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/newreview/1913/v1n02-jan-11-1913.pdf