Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

The classic and most cited example of "Black-
White workers unity" has always been the United Mine
Workers. From its founding in 1890, the UMW constitution
admitted all coal miners regardless of "race, creed or
nationality." As early as 1900 the UMW had some 20,000
Afrikan members, while even in the earliest years an
Afrikan miner, Richard L. Davis, was a union leader
(Davis was elected to the UMW National Executive Board
in 1896 and 1897). Davis himself said after many white
miners voted to put him on the Board that the "...question
of color in our miners organization will soon be a thing of
the past." By 1939 the UMW had as many as 100,000
Afrikan members, and Horace Cayton and George Mitchell
wrote that year in Black Workers and the New
Unions that the UMW was "...from the point of view of
the participation of Negroes, the most important in the
country. "
One of the earliest modern industrial unions in the
U.S., the UMW was the only major union with significant
Afrikan membership. The most integrated union in the
AFL, the UMW under John L. Lewis led the breakaway
from the old AFL to form the more militant CIO. To this
very day the Mine Workers Unions has Afrikan local and
district officers and the original constitutional provisions
still making discrimination by any member grounds for expulsion.
The historic place assigned the UMW as an example
of "working class unity" and integration is unique.
The Negro Almanac says, for instance: "It has been said
that no other CIO leader better understood 'the importance
of equalitarian racial policies for successful unionlsm
that John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers.' In this
union, the common economic and occupational hardships
endured by all minimized-although they did not totally
eliminate- racial differences among members, even in the
South.. .CIO policies ultimately prompted Thurgood Marshall
to declare that 'The program (of this organization)
has become a bill of rights for Negro labor in America.''
In the UMW we can examine tactical unity over a 90
year period in a major industry. The fundamental reality
was that Afrikan miners and Euro-Amerikan miners had
tactical unity, but different strategic interests. Afrikan
miners attempted to pursue their tactical interests by
uniting within settler unionism, helping to organize all coal
miners and thus building a strong enough union to
significantly increase wages and improve working conditions.
This tactical unity was very practical and easily
understood. But the strategic contradicfions are now
equally clear, while seldom brought to light. While
Afrikan workers had the strategic goal of liberating their
nation from the U.S. Empire, the settler workers had the
strategic goal of preserving the U.S. Empire's exploitation
of the oppressed nations. The mythology that they had
"common class interests" proved factually untrue.