Chapter 3: The Industrial Era and the Rise of Labor Unions: Struggles for Inclusive Worker Rights
As the 20th century progressed, the United States industrialized rapidly – and Black Americans were part of this transformation, both North and South. The Great Migration (roughly 1916–1970) saw millions of African Americans leave the terror and peonage of the Jim Crow South for cities in the North and West, seeking better jobs in factories, stockyards, and steel mills. This mass movement fundamentally changed the American workforce.
By the 1920s, Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and New York had growing Black industrial communities. Black men found work as foundry laborers, meatpackers, autoworkers, and dockworkers; Black women often labored as domestic workers, laundresses, or in segregated factory jobs like tobacco processing. Life in the urban North offered comparatively higher wages and the chance to vote and organize – but Black migrants faced entrenched discrimination in employment and housing. They were often the last hired and first fired. Factories would frequently confine Black workers to the hottest, dirtiest, lowest-paid jobs (a practice sometimes called the “last hired, lowest paid” approach).
It was within this context that the American labor union movement both clashed with and eventually embraced Black workers. Initially, many trade unions were openly racist. The American Federation of Labor (AFL), dominant in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was a federation of craft unions that largely excluded Black workers (and many immigrants) by insisting on the color bar in apprentice programs or simply by custom. AFL unions in railroads, construction, and other trades often barred African Americans entirely.
However, there were also unions and labor leaders who saw the folly of racism. As early as the 1880s, the Knights of Labor nominally welcomed Black members, and some biracial union efforts emerged in the South – for example, the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union (STFU) was an interracial effort in the 1930s to organize sharecroppers.
A watershed moment came during World War II. With labor shortages and the urgency of war production, Black workers gained entry into industries previously closed to them. When the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, led by A. Philip Randolph, succeeded in getting better wages and conditions for Black Pullman railcar attendants in the 1930s, it showcased Black labor organizing power. Randolph leveraged that power in 1941 by threatening a March on Washington to protest racial discrimination in defense jobs. To preempt the march, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, banning racial discrimination in war industries and creating the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC).
Although the FEPC lacked strong enforcement, it set a precedent. During the war, more than a million Black men and women secured industrial jobs, and many joined unions. Membership in the UAW in Detroit, for example, included tens of thousands of Black auto workers by 1945, though they still encountered prejudice on the shop floor and in union halls.
By the 1960s, prominent civil rights leaders explicitly linked racial justice to worker justice. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a staunch supporter of unions – he died in Memphis in 1968 while supporting striking Black sanitation workers who carried signs proclaiming “I AM A MAN,” asserting their dignity and rights.
The AFL-CIO (which merged in 1955) had some internal struggles over how strongly to back civil rights, but unions like the UAW under Walter Reuther provided significant support to civil rights campaigns. The slogan of the 1963 March on Washington – “Jobs and Freedom” – captured the dual aims of economic and racial equality.
One cannot overstate the protective role unions played for Black workers who could join them. Union contracts helped narrow wage gaps; studies in the late 20th century showed that unionization raised Black workers’ wages closer to parity with whites, more so than for non-union workers. In 2019, for example, unionized Black men earned about 80% of what unionized white men earned, compared to a non-union gap of 74%.
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By the late 1970s, Black workers were actually more likely to be union members than white workers – a remarkable turnabout from the early 1900s. The public sector was a big reason: sectors like the U.S. Postal Service, public hospitals, transit authorities, and government offices had become major employers of African Americans, and these sectors had high unionization rates. However, the neoliberal era’s deindustrialization and aggressive anti-union policies eroded many of these gains: unionization rates for Black workers fell by more than half from 1983 to 2019.
In summary, the 20th-century labor movement’s record on race is mixed – from exclusion to begrudging inclusion to genuine solidarity – but it’s undeniable that labor unions became one of the most important institutions for advancing Black economic interests. As civil rights leader (and unionist) A. Philip Randolph put it, “The labor movement did not diminish the strength of the nation but enlarged it. By raising the living standards of millions, [unions] contributed to the wealth of the entire country.”
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