Economic Inequality (USA)

Kuznet’s curve,

Hypothesizes that industrializing nations experience a rise and subsequent decline in income inequality.

• gini coefficient rises, then drops -- 50s and 60s

• inequality declines as a welfare state takes hold.

• Inequalities necessary during industrialization

• Equality would undermine economic development

• If you want economic growth, need to reward ppl differentially (bigger risks bigger proceeds)

P.T. Bauer

Arguments re: the virtues of inequalities

• 1) Inequalities come from market forces, not unfair or exploitation

• 2) Harms of redistribution: Equalizing wealth results in hamstringing economic growth 

  • Taxing rich prevents the Bezos’ of the world; punishes creative, productive people

Piketty

• The Kuznets curve appeared to be consistent with experience at the time it was proposed. 

  • However, since the 1960s, inequality has risen in the US and other developed countries

• Inequality has now returned to the levels of the late 19th century

• Solutions?

  • Re-establish post WW2 tax structure (not 95% though)

  • Global tax on wealth

  • Abolish tax havens

  • Leverage natural catastrophes as opportunities (ww2)

1986

• CCA (now CoreCivic) becomes publicly traded

• Private prisons become a true investment opportunity

2000

• Viacom buys BET

  • Major media consolidation reduces Black control over Black culture.

  • Glorification of self-destruction, nihilism

  • Capitalism can co-opt a revolutionary mediu

• NOW: Paramount Global

Big Three - 80%

1. Universal: Def Jam (two chainz), Interscope (carti, durk), Republic, Cash Money, Motown, MISC (sexyred

2. Warner: Atlantic (carti b, kodak, luzi), 300 Entertainment (thug, meg), Warner Records

3. Sony: Columbia, RCA, Epic (future, 21), Arista

• Control access to major DSP playlists (Spotify, Apple, YouTube)

  • Controlled by Spotify’s editorial team/playlist curators

• Youtube: Labels pay to boost videos and place them in trending slots.

Real Income

the actual purchasing power of an individual's income, adjusted for inflation.

• Nominal Income = income without any adjustments for inflation.

• If someone's nominal income increases by 5% but inflation also increases by 5%, their real income remains the same.

• However, if their nominal income increases by 5% but inflation only increases by 2%, their real income increases by 3%.

Supply-side economics

Economic policies that focuses on producers (e.g. tax cuts)

• Lower costs for producers → Hire more workers, invest more

• Prosperity comes from producers, investors, and entrepreneurs.

Demand-Side Economics:

Economic politices that focuses on consumers (e.g. government spending, welfare programs, tax cuts for low/middle-income earners)

• If people have more money in their pockets → they will spend more

What percent of all wealth is Black? (USCB)

Blacks makes up 13.6% of all U.S. households but hold only 4.7% of all wealth.

Black-white wealth gap (USCB: 2021)

Black median wealth = $24,520 (1/10 of whites)

White median wealth = $250,400

• Median: half of white households have more than $250,400 in wealth, and half have less. It’s the middle point in the distribution—not the average.

• White median wealth is lower than white average (mean) wealth.

• Median gives a more accurate picture of the "typical" white household’s wealth, the average is inflated by the ultra-wealthy.

Wealth

Wealth refers to the total value of what a household owns (assets) minus what it owes (debts).

• This includes home equity, savings, investments, retirement accounts, etc

Median household wealth (USCB: 2022)

$176,500.

Poverty line (federal poverty guidelines)

$15,650 for a single person

$21,150 for a family of two

$26,650 for a family of three.

$32,150 for a family of four

Threshold to be in the top 0.1% income earners in the US

3.3 million annually

Threshold to be in the top 1% income earners in the US

$800,000 annually

1920s

Notable highpoint of economic inequality in American history

• Inequality reduced in the aftermath of the Great Depression, with wealth inequality falling through to the late 1970s.

Gilded Age

The period in American history from roughly 1870 to 1900 characterized by rapid industrialization and economic growth, but also by significant corruption and inequality.

• The term suggests a surface veneer of prosperity and progress masking underlying societal problems. (mark twain)

“Income Shares of Top 5% and Top 1%”

Shares of total income going to people in different economic strata

• For example, the top 5% of taxpayers accounted for 23% of total income in 1981, but almost 38% in 2014. The top 1% accounted for 10% of total income in 1981, but more than 21% in 2014; a

Different ways of measuring income inequality

• Share of Total US Wealth (shares of wealth held by…)

• Share of Total US (Income Shares of Top 1%)

• Top Incomes by Income Percentile

• Cumulative Income Growth by Income Percentile

• Family Incomes by Income Percentile

The share of wealth owned by the top 0.1% is almost the same as the bottom 90%

Share of total US wealth owned by the top 0.1% (2014)

22%

• 160,000 families with total net assets of more than $20m in 2012.

• increased from 7% (1984)

Share of total US wealth owned by the top 1% (2014)

42%

Share of total US wealth owned by the top 5% (2014)

65%

Share of total US wealth owned by the bottom 90%

23%

• Included 144 million families

• Was 36% in the mid-1980s

Economic argument in favor of economic inequality

• Hinges on the assumption that large fortunes/tax savings will be invested in productive economic activities (e.g. expanded jobs, increased wages)

  • Instead: jewelry, yachts, and caviar

  • tax savings not used to increase wages or expand jobs

Quintile

One of five values that divide a range of data into five equal parts, each being one fifth (20%) of the range.

• probability of any given family rising from the bottom quintile of the income distribution into the top quintile over the course of a decade increased slightly

Freedmen’s Bureau

Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters

Double V Campaign

Harriet Jacobs (1815 – 1897)

An American abolitionist and autobiographer who crafted her own experiences into Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (1861), an eloquent and uncompromising slave narrative.

“Ballot or the Bullet” (1964)

Malcolm X advised African Americans to judiciously exercise their right to vote,

• cautioned that if the government continued to prevent African Americans from attaining full equality, it might be necessary for them to take up arms.

Black Reconstruction in America (1935)

Challenged the standard academic view of Reconstruction (i.e. the period was a failure and downplayed the contributions of African Americans.)

• Du Bois instead emphasized the agency of Black people and freed slaves

• Framed the period as one that held promise for a worker-ruled democracy to replace a slavery-based plantation economy.

Negro Factories Corporation (NFC)

• Existed: 1920-21

“Negro producers, Negro distributors, Negro consumers!”

• Black-owned factories, retailers, services and other businesses,

• Incorporate on January 30, 1920 by Garvey, William Ferris and John G. Bayne (insolvent in 1921 - roughly one year and nine months)

• Offered stock shares, at $5 each to provide loans to establish black-owned businesses

• Businesses included a chain of grocery stores, a restaurant, a steam laundry, a tailor and dressmaking shop, a millinery store and a publishing house.

• Cornerstone of Garvey's vision for Black economic independence / economic self-reliance

Harry Haywood

Colored Farmers' National Alliance and Cooperative Union

• 1886 to 1891

• Texas—> Entire South

• Producer cooperative

• membership of 1.2 million in 1891.

• The Alliance organized its members to pool resources, collectively purchase supplies, and market their crops cooperatively—core practices of producer co-ops.

• Members pooled money to buy tools, fertilizer, seed, and food at wholesale prices through Alliance-sponsored stores.

• This reduced individual expenses, allowing each farmer to retain more of their crop income.

Mandela Grocery Cooperative (OAKLAND)

• worker-owned grocery store in West Oakland

Cooperation Jackson (MISSISSIPI)

• A network of worker cooperatives in Jackson, Mississippi

• Heavily inspired by the Mondragon Corporation in Spain, which is also a federation of cooperatives

• These include the lawn care business The Green Team, the organic vegetable farm Freedom Farms, and the print shop The Center for Community Production, which also operates a 3D printer.

Freedom Farm Cooperative (FFC)

• 1967-1976

• Mississippi, founded by American civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer

• The FFC purchased land, which was then distributed among Black families for collective farming.

• Provided resources and training to help families grow their own food

• Hamer emphasized that the cooperative was for the poorest

OneUnited Bank

• 1968

Largest Black-owned bank in USA

Letter from Birmingham Jail

• 1963

• a defense of his involvement in the movement and a response to white clergymen whose open letter in a Birmingham newspaper asked blacks to end their demonstrations for the good of the city

• King asked the white clergy to take a moral stand, since “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

• King’s letter explained that he was no “outside agitator,” as local segregationist reporters and city offi cials often labeled him

"The Ballot or the Bullet" speech

• 1964

• “A ballot is like a bullet. You don't throw your ballots until you see a target, and if that target is not within your reach, keep your ballot in your pocket.”

Harriet Jacobs

Blanche Bruce

• An American politician. Bruce represented Mississippi as a U.S. Senator from 1875 to 1881 and was the first black to serve a full term in the Senate.

Hiram Revels

Federal Housing Administration (FHA)

• FHA bears a greater responsibility for institutionalizing and encouraging the practice.

• The FHA explicitly practiced redlining from its inception by refusing to insure mortgages in or near African American neighborhoods, using color-coded maps to identify "safe" areas for lending.

• While private lenders followed the FHA's lead, the FHA's actions created a system where redlining became a widespread, federally-supported policy.

• The Federal Housing Administration (FHA), not the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC), is considered more responsible for perpetuating redlining practices.

• Encourage Lending: By insuring mortgages, the FHA reduces the risk for lenders, making them more willing to offer mortgages, particularly to borrowers who might otherwise be considered too risky.

• Expand Homeownership: This reduced risk for lenders, in turn, makes it easier for potential homeowners to qualify for mortgages, especially those with smaller down payments or less-than-perfect credit histories. This expands access to homeownership for many Americans who might not qualify for conventional mortgages. 

• Benefits for Homebuyers: FHA loans are particularly popular with first-time homebuyers and individuals with lower credit scores because they offer lower down payment requirements and less stringent credit history requirements compared to traditional loans.

Redlining

A process by which banks draw lines on a map and refuse to lend money to purchase or improve property within the boundaries.

• illegal discriminatory practice in which a mortgage lender denies loans or an insurance provider restricts services to certain areas of a community, often because of the racial characteristics of the applicant’s neighbourhood.

• Redlining practices also include unfair and abusive loan terms for borrowers, outright deception, and penalties for prepaying loans.

• Living in a redlined area meant banks would not approve home loans or mortgages for people living there—even if they were trying to buy a home elsewhere.

• The Federal Housing Administration (FHA), not the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC), is considered more responsible for perpetuating redlining practices.

Black Star Line

• Shipping line created by Marcus Garvey to get blacks back to Africa.

Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA)

Created: 1914

Apex: 1920

• Organization founded by Marcus Garvey in 1914 to promote black self-help, pan-Africanism, and racial separatism.

• An association that promoted black pride and black unity. It also encouraged African Americans to move permanently to Africa.

The Atlanta Compromise (1895)

Argument put forward by Booker T. Washington that African-Americans should not focus on civil rights or social equality but concentrate on economic self-improvement.

Poor People's Campaign

• Federal Job Guarantee (FJG)

New Negro Movement

- Political/Intellectual context for the Harlem Renaissance

- The literary and intellectual flowering that fostered a new black cultural identity in the 1920s and 30s

- Has been called the "spiritual coming of age" in which the black community was able to seize upon its "first chances for group expression and self-determination"

Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters

Created:1925

Apex: late 1930s/early 1940s

• Union founded by A.Philip Randolph in 1925 to help African Americans who worked for the Pullman Company.

• A prominent black trade union of railroad car porters working for the Pullman Company.

18,000 passenger railway workers

Trade Union

Labor Union

Sharecropping

(1865-1940s)

• An agricultural system where landowners allowed farmers (sharecroppers) to use their land in exchange for a portion of the crop yield, typically half

• Became the accepted labour system in most of the South after slavery

• Following the American Civil War and the abolition of slavery, most freed people lacked land or money and had to continue working for white plantation owners.

• Charges for the land, supplies, and housing were deducted from the sharecroppers’ portion of the harvest (ABOUT HALF), often leaving them with substantial debt to the landowners in bad years.

• Sharecroppers received what was left if they were able to pay back the owners—generally about half of what had been produced under decent arrangements.

• Shady practices

  • Debt if bad yield

  • Landowners also charged extremely high interest rates.

  • Landowners often weighed harvested crops themselves, which presented further opportunities to deceive or extort sharecroppers

  • Drive them away just before it was time to harvest the crops

Great Migration

(1916-1970)

Six Million

• From 1916 to 1970 an estimated six million Black Southerners relocated to the North and West in search of economic opportunities and an escape from racial violence.

• The movement of millions of African Americans from rural communities in the South to urban areas in Northern and Western states during the 20th century.

• In 1900 nearly eight million Black people—about 90 percent of all Black Americans—lived in the South

• Lynchings, sharecropping, and Black Codes locked Black Americans into poverty and disenfranchisement

• Immigration Act of 1924: Urban factories, foundries, and slaughterhouses that fueled Northern industries faced labor shortages.

• The bulk of this mass relocation happened between the 1940s—when World War II began and more jobs were being offered in the North and West—and 1970.

• Arguably spurred Black political action and the civil rights movement bc concentration of Black people in a place free of Jim Crow and lynchings

• CITIES: Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, New York City, and Philadelphia.

  • Difficulties: redlining, segregated housing, segregated schools, poor working conditions and low pay,

Do all prisoners work (as slavery)?

Gen. William T. Sherman’s Special Field Order 15

• issued on January 16, 1865,

• 40 acres and a mule

• redistribute to newly freed Black families confiscated Confederate property

• Set aside confiscated land along the South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida coasts for settlement by newly freed Black families.

• The revocation of the order hindered efforts by African Americans to achieve economic independence after emancipation and forced many into sharecropping

Black Codes

(1865-1868)

the numerous laws adopted in the states of the former Confederacy after the American Civil War that were intended to maintain white supremacy in those places.

• Enacted in 1865 and 1866

• The Black Codes were all intended to secure a steady supply of cheap labor,

• Vagrancy laws: declared a Black person to be vagrant if unemployed and without permanent residence;

  • a person so defined could be arrested, fined, and bound out for a term of labor if unable to pay the fine.

  • ***Forced labor through vagrancy laws***

• Apprentice laws: provided for the “hiring out” of Black orphans and other young dependents to white people, who sometimes had previously been their enslavers.

• Property laws: Some states limited the type of property African Americans could own, and in other states Black people were excluded from certain businesses or from skilled trades.

• Mississippi and South Carolina enacted the first black codes (1865):

  • Mississippi’s law: required Black people to have written evidence of employment for the coming year each January; if they left before the end of the contract, they would be forced to forfeit earlier wages and were subject to arrest.

  • South Carolina: a law prohibited Black people from holding any occupation other than farmer or servant unless they paid an annual tax of $10 to $100. This provision hit free Black people already living in Charleston and former slave artisans especially hard

• Under black codes, many states required Black people to sign yearly labor contracts; if they refused, they risked being arrested, fined and forced into unpaid labor.

• Marriage laws: Legal marriage between African Americans was provided for, but interracial marriage was prohibited.

• Reconstruction did away with the Black Codes (e.g. Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments)

Red Summer of 1919

a period in which racial violence spread throughout at least 26 cities, killing hundreds, injuring thousands, and causing mass displacement.

• Chicago Race Riot of 1919, in which 38 died (23 Black, 15 white), 537 were injured, and 1,000 Black families were left homeless. D

Jim crow in north as well?

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

(2010)

• Conventional view: systemic racial discrimination mostly ended with the civil rights movement reforms of the 1960s

• Alexander posits that the U.S. criminal justice system uses the War on Drugs as a primary tool for enforcing traditional, as well as new, modes of discrimination and oppression

• This ultimately leads Alexander to argue that mass incarceration is "a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized social control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow".

• Its emergence, she believes, is a direct response to the civil rights movement.

  • mass incarceration is "the most damaging manifestation of the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement", a

• Alexander contends that in 1982 the Reagan administration began an escalation of the War on Drugs, purportedly as a response to a crack cocaine crisis in black ghettos, which was (she claims) announced well before crack cocaine arrived in most inner city neighborhoods.

• The current rate of incarceration in the US is six to ten times greater than in other industrialized nations,

• the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) acknowledged that during the 1980s the Contra faction—covertly supported by the US in Nicaragua—had been involved in smuggling cocaine into the US and distributing it in US cities.

• Disparate sentencing policies (the crack cocaine vs. powdered cocaine penalty disparity was 100–1 by weight and remains 18–1 even after recent reform effort

  • a disproportionate number of inner city residents were charged with felonies and sentenced to long prison terms, because they tended to purchase the more affordable crack version of cocaine, rather than the powdered version commonly consumed in the suburbs

CAUSES OF INEQUALITY

CAUSES OF INEQUALITY

CONTRIBUTIONS TO EQUALITY

CONTRIBUTIONS TO EQUALITY

• Freedman’s Bureau: first welfare agency

Jim Crow law

laws that enforced racial segregation in the South between 1877 and 1950s.

• From the late 1870s, laws requiring the separation of whites from “persons of colour” in public transportation and schools.

• The segregation principle was extended to public accommodations (e.g. parks, cemeteries, theatres, and restaurants) in an effort to prevent any contact between Blacks and whites as equals. It was codified on local and state levels and most famously with the “separate but equal” decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).

• From 1887 to 1892 nine states, including Louisiana, passed laws requiring separation on public conveyances, such as streetcars and railroads.

Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC)

(Est. 1933)

HOLC was a New Deal program designed to help homeowners avoid foreclosure during the Great Depression.

• established to encourage widespread home ownership and suburban development by making home loans and mortgages affordable.

• Created Residential Security Maps, which used a color-coded system (green, blue, yellow, and red) to assess the risk associated with lending in different neighborhoods, a practice now known as redlining.

  • However, neighbourhoods that were mixed-race or predominantly African American did not benefit from those programs, because their credit was considered high-risk.

Major civil rights organizations

• NAACP

  • Ideology: Legal equality

  • Tactics

  • Base: Middle class

• National Urban League

  • Ideology:

  • Tactics:

  • Base:

• SCLC: Southern Christian Leadership Conference

  • King

  • Ideology: Christian nonviolence

  • Tactics: Protests, marches

  • Base: Churchgoers

• CORE: Congress of Racial Equality

  • Ideology: Started integrationist → nationalist

  • Tactics: Freedom Rides

  • Base: Initially interracial

• SNCC: Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

  • Ideology: Grassroots radicalism

  • Tactics: Sit-ins, organizing

  • Base: Students, rural poor

Convict lease system

• A system, primarily in the Southern United States, where states leased out prisoners to private companies and individuals for labor.

  • This system emerged after the Civil War, effectively replacing slavery and generating revenue for states while alleviating prison overcrowding.

  • The system arose as a means to address labor shortages and generate income for state and local governments.

  • The practice peaked about 1880

  • In 1898, 73% of Alabama's annual state revenue came from convict leasing.

  • Last state to abolish: Alabama in 1928

Penal labor (compared to convict lease system)

• the practice of using incarcerated individuals to perform various types of work, either for government-run or private industries.

• Incarcerated workers provide services valued at $9 billion annually and produce over $2 billion in goods.

• COMPARED TO CONVICT LEASE SYSTEM

  • Convict lease: Lessees had full control over the prisoners, with little state oversight.

    • Regulation: none. Prisoners were often treated as disposable labor—abuse, death, and torture were common.

    • Payment: None

  • Penal labor: The state retains control over the incarcerated, with regulations (however limited) meant to protect them.

    • Payment: minimal

    • Regulation: There are legal frameworks (e.g. minimum standards, though not minimum wage) and some labor protections.

A. Philip Randolph and NAACP president Walter White’s seven-point program to FDR for the just treatment of African Americans in the nation’s armed forces.(1940)

• They urged that all available black reserve officers be used to train recruits

• That black recruits be given the same training as whites*

• That existing units of the army accept officers and enlisted men on the basis of ability and not race*

• That specialized personnel, such as physicians, dentists, and nurses, be integrated

• That responsible African Americans be appointed to draft boards

• That discrimination be abolished in the Navy and the Army Air Corps (as the air force was then known)

• That competent African Americans be appointed as civilian assistants to the secretaries of war and the navy.

The March on Washington 1941

• A. Philip Randolph proposed a mass March on Washington

  • Demanded defense jobs and an integrated military

• He called for an all-black march with the aim of emboldening African Americans with a sense of their own power and also to preclude communist infiltration and dominance

• Randolph’s stirring words to his people emphasized the need for a new style of activism, specifically large-scale, direct-action protest with pressure on the federal government itself.

• Randolph: “Dear fellow Negro Americans, be not dismayed in these terrible times. You possess power, great power. Our problem is to hitch it up for action on the broadest, daring and most gigantic scale. In this period of power politics, nothing counts but pressure, more pressure and still more pressure, through the tactic and strategy of broad organized, aggressive mass action behind the vital and important issues of the Negro.”

• As African Americans from all over the United States prepared to converge on the Capitol on July 1, government leaders took cognizance of the world’s attention on American racial policies and asked worriedly, “What will they think in Berlin?”

• After several conferences, the president proposed a compromise—he promised to issue an order “with teeth in it,” prohibiting discrimination in employment in defense industries and in the government, if Randolph called off the march.

• On June 25, 1941, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 (no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or Government because of race, creed, color, or national origin)

• Hopeful, Randolph canceled the march

Executive Order 8802

• 1941

Prohibited discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or Government because of race, creed, color, or national origin)

• A clause prohibiting discrimination was placed in all defense contracts,

• A Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) was established to receive and investigate complaints against industries in violation of the order

• The FEPC disclosed evidences of discrimination, although it had no power to impose punishment and, because of the war emergency, generally refused to recommend the cancellation of war contracts.

• Occasionally employers and unions changed their policies to avoid being called to appear as defendants at committee hearings

• Many initially hailed the order as the most significant document affecting them since the Emancipation Proclamation.

• In its first year, the newly established Committee on Fair Employment Practice (FEPC) received more than six thousand complaints of racial discrimination. B

"Arsenal of Democracy"

Refers to the mobilization of the United States' industrial capacity during World War II to supply the Allied forces with the weapons and materials needed to fight against the Axis powers.

National Labor Relations Board

• an independent U.S. federal agency that safeguards employees' rights to form unions, engage in collective bargaining, and ensures fair labor practices in the workplace.

  • The agency investigates and prosecutes employers and unions for unfair labor practices, such as illegal firing, discrimination, or refusal to bargain in good faith. 

  • The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) was created to enforce the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA)

Capital appreciation

Dividends —> shareholders

Bonuses —> executives 

Usury / usurious interest rates

Predatory credit card practices / Predatory Lending

Cap credit card interest rates

Why did labor unions gain power in the 1930s?

Due to federal support of workers’ rights and the growing militancy of workers themselves

Section 7a of the National Industrial Recovery Act

Established the NRA, provided that employees should have the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing without “interference, restraint, or coercion of employers of labor.”

• The National Labor Board (NLB) was set up to enforce those provisions of the statute

Wagner Act (aka the National Labor Relations Act or NLRA 1935)

• Wagner Act gave permanency and strength to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which had replaced the NLB the previous year.

• The act established clear-cut rules for collective bargaining and set up twenty-two regional boards to conduct elections in industry to determine what group of employees was entitled to bargain with employers.

• The NLRB also received wide powers in handling labor disputes and settling strikes. It was indeed, as it was called at the time, “labor’s bill of rights.”

National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) vs National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)

• The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA): a U.S. law that protects the rights of private sector employees to organize, form unions, and bargain collectively.

• The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB): is a federal agency that enforces the NLRA. The NLRB investigates unfair labor practices and conducts union elections, while the NLRA outlines the rights and protections for employees.

Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1936

• Gave African American workers an entrée into the trade union movement.

• CIO established by John L. Lewis after he clashed with the AFL over organizing strategy.

• The vast majority of black steelworkers joined the CIO-affiliated Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) in 1936.

  • 1937 → thousands of Black workers benefited from pay raises

• The CIO successfully organized R. J. Reynolds Co. tobacco workers in Winston-Salem, North Carolina

CIO vs AFL (rival federations of unions)

• AFL: insisted on organizing workers on the basis of craft, which excluded unskilled workers

• CIO: subscribed to the concept of industrial unionism, in which all workers in a given industry joined in a single union regardless of their skill level (e.g. automobile workers, steel workers, garment workers, and dock workers)

  • was committed to organizing workers regardless of race or gender, and it succeeded in organizing Black workers in several key industries, including steel workers, garment workers, longshoremen, and automobile workers.

CIO’s obstacles in the South

• limited industrial development

• the absence of a history of labor activism

• most significantly, the Jim Crow system that divided white and black workers, while easing class tensions among whites.

Labor Movement & Civil Rights Movement (CIO)

• Southern industrial unionism (i.e. its linkage of economic and racial justice), provided an early model for the civil rights movement

• Workers could not advance toward economic justice without also attempting to dismantle racial segregation.

• The biracial unionism favored by the left-leaning CIO unsettled Jim Crow and suggested that the labor movement could encompass such larger social goals as civil rights for blacks.

• Union organizers found their strongest support among black workers, who drew on a long tradition of protest and applied it to the labor movement.

  • Union meetings in the South took on a different quality, with African Americans incorporating prayer and religious song.

• “Civil rights unionism” waned in the South with the onset of World War II, as the federal government turned its attention to the international scene and conservative white leaders steered CIO unions away from civil rights objectives.

• Then, beginning in the late 1940s, Cold War red-baiting further thwarted this nascent movement with the rise of popular anticommunism, the repeal at the federal level of labor gains, and the stifl ing of public debate over workers’ rights.

Interracial labor activism — Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union (STFU)

• By the mid 1930s, conditions in rural Arkansas had become bad enough to convince not only urban workers but also Black and white tenant farmers to set aside centuries-old racial hate and join together in protest.

• In July 1934, seven black and eleven white tenant farmers refused to work the cotton crop unless they secured better wages (…the landowner summarily evicted them)

• Led by socialist organizers. these eighteen tenant farmers formed the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union (STFU)— perhaps the most dramatic example of interracial labor activism on a grassroots level.

• By 1939 the STFU claimed 30,000 members in four states.

Tenant farming vs sharecropping

• No, tenant farming and sharecropping are not the same

• Tenant farmers: typically rent land and pay rent in cash or a share of the crops

• Sharecroppers also rent land but pay rent exclusively with a portion of their harvest.

  • Sharecroppers often lack their own farming equipment and supplies, relying on the landowner, while tenant farmers may own some or all of these. 

Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union (STFU)

• Apex: 1937 and 1938'; 35,000 members

• Most dramatic example of interracial labor activism on a grassroots level.

  • Southern labor organizations

• The collapse of the agricultural economy and the failure of the New Deal agricultural policies spurred the growth of the STFU, whose members demanded better wages, better working conditions, and a role in the administration of federal funds.

• Like other southern labor organizations that included blacks, the STFU met with a campaign of terror, from evictions and arrests to mob violence and lynching.

• In 1937, the STFU attempted to join the CIO..., the merger soon soured...The STFU never recovered

• The publicity around the STFU and its brutal repression drew national attention to the cause of tenant farmers and was a catalyst for the founding of the New Deal’s Resettlement Administration (which became the Farm Security Administration)

  • The Resettlement Administration (RA), established during the New Deal in 1935, was a federal agency that aimed to relocate struggling rural and urban families to planned communities. It later became the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in 1937.

  • The FSA focused on providing relief to poor farmers, sharecroppers, and migrant workers through loans, farm management planning, and healthcare programs.

African America socialism and/or communism in 1920s

• A. Philip Randolph, Cyril Briggs, Eric Walrond, and Claude McKay (Jamaica)

• Harlem Renaissance: McKay and Langston Hughes had consistently drawn on working-class life in their writings during the Harlem Renaissance years.

  • The poetry of Sterling Brown, especially in Southern Road (1932), captured the defiant spirit of rural black folk in the face of oppression.

  • The collaboration of black poet Waring Cuney and blues musician Josh White resulted in songs that carried words of protest.

  • In the 1930s, Langston Hughes published in leftist magazines, such as New Masses, and supported radical initiatives.

  • Countee Cullen’s poem on the Scottsboro case appeared in the Communist Party newspaper Daily Worker

  • Yet protest themes and economic critiques would be more popular during the Depression years.

• 1930s: Richard Wright was the best-known black leftist in the 1930s (Despite his later denunciation of communism,)

  • Wright conveyed unmistakable leftist sympathies in his poetry and fiction. His stark and tragic descriptions of race and poverty exemplified the then-popular literary style of social realism.

  • Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) and Native Son (1940) put him among the leading American writers of the day.

African America communism in the 1930s

• The message of racial equality that was preached (not always practiced), by whites in the Communist Party USA appealed to a cross-section of African Americans in the 1930s.

  • It appeared to be one of the few organizations willing to make bold, public attacks against Jim Crow

  • Recognizing the link between economic and civil rights in Alabama, black communists organized protests against lynching and police brutality and launched right-to-vote campaigns.

  • Communist leaders organized the unemployed in Birmingham in the early 1930s,

  • Rural blacks also allied with the Communist Party by forming the Share Croppers’ Union (SCU), which had two thousand members by 1933.

• Two landmark civil rights cases brought the Communist Party and racial justice into the national spotlight

  • Scottsboro case (1931): nine black youths falsely accused

    • While the NAACP hesitantly debated whether and how to handle the case, the Communist-affiliated International Labor Defense (ILD) took over the appeals process. By 1937 five of the nine were freed, and by 1950 the last of them had been released.

  • Herndon case: a 19 yo coal miner and Communist agitator arrested for organizing an interracial protest of the unemployed in Birmingham, Alabama.

    • After a five-year court battle, the ILD secured his freedom.

  • The Scottsboro and Herndon cases had a tremendous impact on African Americans’ perception of the Communist Party in its fight for civil rights in the 1930s.

    • As a result of these high-profile cases, Communist Party membership rose from a few hundred African Americans in 1930 to 2,500 in 1935.

    • The Scottsboro case in particular empowered many African Americans to engage in active resistance, despite the risk of violent repercussions

Share Croppers’ Union (SCU)

• Apex: 1935-1936. 

• Aligned with Communist Party

• Rural blacks also allied with the Communist Party by forming the Share Croppers’ Union (SCU), which had two thousand members by 1933.

• Using organizational skills gained in social and religious organizations, Black women took leadership roles in the neighborhood relief committees of the SCU.

• Although the SCU won a few strikes, it was brutally repressed by police and white vigilante violence.

• Communist influence in Alabama culminated in a wave of strikes in 1934, but it waned after 1935.

National Negro Congress (started 1935)

• The National Negro Congress represented a coalition of Communists, middle-class black organizations, and workers, united against fascism and racial oppression.

  • Leder: A. Phillip Randolph

  • NNC launched a three-pronged platform: labor-Black alliance, civil rights, and antifascism.

    • This interracial, cross-class coalition dissolved after 1940, as a result of the Communist Party USA, like other Communist parties around the world, supporting the Hitler-Stalin Non-aggression Pact.

    • Everywhere, news of the Hitler-Stalin Pact shocked anti-fascist liberals, socialists, and others on the left who had supported or been sympathetic to the Soviet Union and the Popular Front movement. The withdrawal of many non-Communist members from the NNC was typical of this widespread reaction.

• NAACP and the National Urban League, as well as of the black churches, were inadequate responses to the persistent privation afflicting blacks in the Depression.

• Denounced the racism of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the limitations of the New Deal in addressing the crisis.

• In their call for a single federation to unite all black organizations, the idea of the National Negro Congress was born.

• It convened in Chicago in February 1936, with 800 delegates representing 551 organizations and more than 300,000 people. With A. Phillip Randolph at its helm, the NNC launched a three-pronged platform that endorsed a laborblack alliance, civil rights, and antifascism.

Communists’ Popular Front

• Brought African Americans of varying political persuasions into common cause with the Communist Party; instead of attacking liberal and leftist (but non-Communist) political parties, labor unions, and other civic movements, Communists would invite these former political enemies to join them to form a “Popular Front” dedicated to resisting fascism and other right-wing forces.

  • E.g. National Negro Congress

  • E.g. the Southern Negro Youth Conference (SNYC).

Southern Negro Youth Conference (SNYC)

• Southern Negro Youth Conference (SNYC)

  • successful use of the Popular Front strategy

• Proposals included:

  • the teaching of African American history in southern public schools

  • calling on blacks “to use the ballot and political pressure to get more Blacks elected to local school boards and hired as teachers in both black and integrated schools.”

  • Additionally, the SNYC planned to fight against racial disparities in access to health care and supported legislation to improve educational opportunities for black youth.

• SNYC group activism (examples)

  • participation in the black tobacco workers’ campaign in 1937.

  • later organized black workers into a union, the Tobacco Stemmers and Laborers Industrial Union (TSLIU), in Richmond, Virginia, at the Carrington and Michaux Tobacco Stemming Company on April 16, 1937

    • Labor demands: higher wages, shorter working hours, and better working conditions.

The Southern Conference for Human Welfare

• November 1938: an interracial and interclass coalition (e.g. businesspeople, labor leaders, sharecroppers, journalists, students, and politicians, including members of Congress) convened in Birmingham, Alabama, to discuss the economic crisis in the South.

  • The SCHW’s egalitarianism was quickly put to the test when the city’s police chief interrupted a meeting and ordered the participants to comply with the segregated seating required by city ordinances.

  • In response, the SCHW passed a resolution never to meet in a place where segregation was legal.

  • It took unequivocal stands against lynching, discrimination, the poll tax, and similar matters, and it usually allied with liberal labor forces

  • It was frequently accused of left-wing leanings and in the early 1940s was listed as a subversive group by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which had been established in 1938.

W.E.B. DuBois: Talented Tenth (1903)

• Emphasizing the necessity for higher education to develop the leadership capacity among the most able 10 percent of black Americans.

  • feared the overemphasis on industrial training would confine Blacks permanently to the ranks of second-class citizenship.

• In order to achieve political and civil equality, Du Bois stressed the importance of educating African American teachers, professional men, ministers, and spokesmen, who would earn their special privileges by dedicating themselves to “leavening the lump” and “inspiring the masses.”

• Harrison called for a “New Negro” leadership, not of the Talented Tenth but of the masses of black people

• term began to be used in the 1890s

• Coined by Henry Morehouse:

  • 1896: perhaps in response to Booker T. Washington’s ATL speech, referred to the Talented Tenth

  • “high education of the talented tenth man of the colored colleges. . . . Industrial education is good for the nine”