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2,000 UAW Members Rally to Support Fuyao Workers

National Negro Labor Council founded on October 27, 1951.

In the 1950s, most Americans were enjoying the economic boom that followed World War II. If they didn’t push progressive ideas that threatened the nation’s social norms, or associate with groups “connected” to the Communist Party, life was good.

That was not true for everyone. Even after serving their country in the war, African-Americans still faced rampant discrimination in education, housing, public facilities and at work. Coleman Young, who would later become Detroit’s first African-American mayor, knew that firsthand. He had worked at Ford Motor Co., and had been blacklisted for his union and civil rights activities. He had even been grilled by the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee. Though unions had done much to transform workplaces, there was still rampant inequality. Young, who was a distinguished U.S. Army veteran and a staff member of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers union, wanted to fix that.

In June 1950, he and 900 other African-American delegates gathered in Chicago for a meeting of what they called the National Labor Conference for Negro Rights. He joined William R. Hood, recording secretary of UAW Local 600, Cleveland Robinson, vice president of the independent Office Workers Union, and Octavia Hawkins of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Local 451, as the group’s leaders. On October 27, 1951, the group met in Cincinnati and founded the National Negro Labor Council (NNLC) which now had 23 chapters representing major cities in every region of the country.

In a founding Statement of Principles, the NNLC pledged to "work unitedly with the trade unions to bring about greater cooperation between all sections of the Negro people and the trade union movement."

In Detroit, NNLC activists fought and won access for African-Americans to administrative jobs at Sears, Ford, and as ball players for the Detroit Tigers. In New York, African-Americans won jobs on dairy trucks, in breweries, hotels and restaurants, and as flight attendants. In Chicago, protests forced Drexel National Bank to hire African-American executives. In San Francisco, hotels and restaurant work forces were integrated. In Louisville, Kentucky, an NNLC-led campaign forced General Electric to end hiring discrimination.

The NNLC helped in other ways, too. The United Furniture Workers of America Local 266 asked for help in a strike against Thomasville Chair Company in North Carolina. When mainly African-American sugar workers in Louisiana sought to join the National Agricultural Workers Union, the NNLC helped build unity across racial lines. The achievements were a reminder of the words of W.E.B. Du Bois who several years earlier had said: “The fight of the Negro to enter the unions is but part of their fight for civil and political rights, and that fight is part of the struggle of all men for Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

By 1956, the organization dissolved as NNLC activists saw their struggle as being within the ranks of organized labor rather than outside of it.

The NNLC was a short-lived group, but it set the stage for the civil rights movement and contracts and laws that brought diversity and equality to the nation’s workforce. #PROUAW #UnionHistory ... See MoreSee Less