Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

colored men whom they could guarantee would not
organize and were not bolsheviks." This was at a time
when the Garvey Movement, the all-Afrikan labor unions,
and the growth of Pan-Afrikanist and revolutionary forces
were taking place within the Afrikan nation.
The Northern factories placed strict quotas on the
number of Afrikan workers. Not because they weren't profitable
enough. Not because the employers were "prejudiced"
- as the liberals would have it - but because the imperialists
believed that Afrikan labor could most safely be
used when it was surrounded by a greater mass of settler
labor. In 1937 an official of the U.S. Steel Gary Works admitted
that for the previous 14 years corporate policy had
set the percentage of Afrikan workers at the mill to 15%.
(32)
The Ford Motor Co. had perhaps the most extensive
system of using Afrikan labor under plantation-like
control, with Henry Ford acting as the planter. A special
department of Ford management was concerned with
dominating not only the on-the-job life of Afrikan
workers, but the refugee community as well. Ford hired
only through the Afrikan churches, with each church being
given money if its members stayed obedient to Ford. ~ h;
company also subsidized Afrikan bourgeois organizations.
His Afrikan employees and their families constituted
about one-fourth of the entire Detroit Afrikan community.
Both the NAACP and the Urban League were singing
Ford's praises, and warning Afrikan auto workers not to
have anything to do with unions. One report on the Ford
system in the 1930s said:
"There is hardly a Negro church, fraternal body,
or other organization in which Ford workers are not
represented. Scarcely a Negro professional or business
man is completely independent of income derived from
Ford employees. When those seeking Ford jobs are added
to this group, it is readily seen that the Ford entourage was
able to exercise a dominating influence in the
community. " (33)
The Afrikan refugee communities, extensions of
an oppressed nation, became themselves miniature colonies,
with an Afrikan bourgeois element acting as the
local agents of the foreign imperialists. Ford's system was
unusual only in that one capitalist very conspicuously took
as his role that which is usually done more quietly by a
committee of capitalists through business, foundations
and their imperialist government.
This colonial existence in the midst of industrial
Amerika gave rise to contradiction, to the segregation of
the oppressed creating its opposite in the increasingly important
role of Afrikan labor in industrial production.
Having been forced to concentrate in certain cities and certain
industries and even certain plants, Afrikan labor at the
end of the 1920's was discovered to have a strategic role in
Northern industry far out of proportion to its still small
numbers. In Cleveland Afrikans comprised 50% of the
metal working industry; in Chicago they were 40-50% of
the meat packing plants; in Detroit the Afrikan auto
workers made up 12% of the workforce at Ford, 10% at
Briggs, 30% at Midland Steel Frame. (34)
86
just arrived in Chicago from the South
Overall, Afrikan workers-employed in the industrial
economy were concentrated in just five industries:
automotive, steel, meat-packing, coal, railroads. The first
four were where settler labor and settler capitalists were
about to fight out their differences in the 1930s and early
1940s. And Afrikan labor was right in the middle.
In a number of industrial centers, then, the CIO
unions could not be secure without controlling Afrikan
labor. And on their side, Afrikan workers urgently needed
improvement in their economic condition. A 1929 study of
the automobile industry comments:
"As one Ford employment official has stated,
'Many of the Negroes are employed in the foundry and do
work that nobody else would do.' The writer noticed in
one Chevrolet plant that Negroes were engaged on the dirtiest,
roughest and most disagreeable work, for example,
in the painting of axles. At the Chrysler plant they are used
exclusively on paint jobs, and at the Chandler-Cleveland
plant certain dangerous emery wheel grinding jobs were
given only to Negroes." (35)
In virtually all auto plants Afrikans were not
allowed to work on the production lines, and were
segregated in foundry work, painting, as janitors, drivers
and other "service" jobs. They earned 35-38 cents per
hour, which was one-half of the pay of the Euro-Amerikan
production line workers. This was true at Packard, at GM,
and many other companies. (36)
The CIO's policy, then, became to promote integration
under settler leadership where Afrikan labor was
numerous and strong (such as the foundries, the meatpacking
plants, etc.), and to maintain segregation and Jim
Crow in situations where Afrikan labor was numerically
lesser and weak. Integration and segregation were but two
aspects of the same settler hegemony.