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Even outside of Alabama the coal miners' union
often depended upon Afrikan struggle. One Afrikan miner
who worked in the mines of Mercer County, West Virgina
for forty-three years recalls: "The white man was scared to
join the union at first around here. The Black man took
the organizing jobs and set it up. We went into the bushes
and met in secret; and we had all the key offices. A few of
the white miners would slip around and come to our
meetings. A,fter they found out that the company wasn't
going to run them away, why they began to appear more
often. And quite naturally, when they became the majority,
they elected who they wanted for their presidents, vice
presidents, and treasurers. They left a few jobs as
secretaries for the Negroes. But at the beginning, most all
of the main offices in the locals were held by Negroes."
(1 1)
The offensive was not merely about job issues, but
was a political outbreak spread among Afrikan workers in
general. In 1919 thousands of Afrikan workers in the
South formed the National Brotherhood Workers, a common
Afrikan workers union centered among the dock,
shipyard and railroad workers in Norfolk and Newport
News, Virginia. In 1923 Afrikan postal workers in
Washington, D.C. formed their own union, the National
Alliance of Postal Employees. This offensive of Afrikan
labor advanced throughout the 1920s and 1930s. (12)
In the mines, in the Birmingham steel mills, on the
docks, the power in the South of Afrikan labor was being
unchained. So much information about these struggles, so
much of this story, has been obscured and put aside. The
role of Afrikan labor in shaking the Empire in those years
was much larger than most believe. This is no accident, for
the main sources for U.S. labor history have been the
various works of the Euro-Amerikan "Left." These works
all have in common an oppressor nation chauvinism. In
this regard such supposedly conflicting "left" writings as
the CPUSA's Labor's Untold Story (by Boyer and
Marais), the Weather Underground Organizations Prairie
Fire, the syndicalist labor history book Strike! (by J.
Brecher) or the Red Papers of the Revolutionary Union
(now RCP) all commit the same distortions.
The revisionists take apart, in their mis-history,
what was one great tidal wave of anti-colonial rising by oppressed
Afrikans. The pieces of history are then scattered
so as to leave no visible sign of the giant stature of that
Afrikan development. Some pieces are "bleached" (stripped
of their national character) and "annexed" by the
Euro-Amerikan radicals as part of their own history. The
history of Afrikan industrial workers in the North suffered
this fate. Some pieces, such as the militant sharecropper
struggle and the leading role of Afrikan coal miners in the
Appalachian South, have been buried.
Matters as a whole are distorted to shrink the
Afrikan story. To take one example: the struggle around
the Scottsboro Boys (the Afrikan teenagers framed for
allegedly raping two settler girls) is always brought up,
while the wide-spread excitement and unity in the 1930s
over the defense cases of armed Afrikans who fought their
settler oppressors is never mentioned. This is just part of
the general distortion of de-emphasizing the intense rising
in the Afrikan South itself. And its nationalist character.
Indeed, many of the most widely used Black Studies texts
- such as the Bracey, Meier & Rudwick Black Nu- 1
tionalism in America or the Huggins, Kilson & Fox Key
Issues in the Afro-American Experience - assure us that
by 1930 Afrikans in the U.S. had lost interest in nationalism.
Nationalism, they tell us, was just a passing
phase back then.
On the contrary, we must underline the fact that
the struggles of Afrikan labor were and are part of the
political history of the entire Afrikan nation, and can only
be correctly understood in that context. Those Afrikan
labor struggles were far more important than we have been
told. In the major 1936-1937 U.S. seamen's strike, for example,
Afrikan sailors played the decisive role in reaching
victory. That was the strike that finally won union rights
on all East Coast U.S. shipping. Led by Ferdinand Smith,
the Jamaican socialist who was vice-president of the National
Maritime Union (NMU-CIO), the 20,000 Afrikan
seamen who were the majority of the workers in the shipping
industry of the Southern and Gulf Coast ports, shut
down those ports completely until the employers gave in.
(13) Afrikan labor was gathering a mightly force in the
South, on its own National Territory.
The colonial contradictions became most intensified
when these peoples' struggles caught fire in the cotton
fields, among the great oppressed mass of Afrikan
tenants and sharecroppers. There the rawest nerve of the
Euro-Amerikan settler occupation was touched, since the
struggle was fundamentally over the land. Revisionism has
tried in its mis-history to picture these sharecropper struggles
as minor conflicts in a backward sector of agriculture,
allegedly marginal to the main arena of struggle in auto,
steel and the rest of Northern heavy industry. The
sharecropper and tenant struggles were central, however,
because they involved the main lahnring fnrce of the
Afrikan Nation and because they were fought over the
land. That's why these struggles were fought out at gunpoint.
The Afrikan sharecroppers and tenant farmers
struggles did not - and could not - take the public mass
dimensions of Northern union organization. Smoldering
under the heavy-handed lynch rule of the settler occupation,
the Afrikan plantation struggles would suddenly
break the surface in an intense confrontation. While.the
issues were couched in the forms of pay, rest hours,
tenants' rights, etc., the underlying issue of contention was
the imperialist slavery of colonial oppression. Unlike the
industrial struggles in the coal mines or steel mills, the
Afrikan struggle on the land immediately and directly
threatened the very fabric of Euro-Amerikan society in the
South. For that reason they were met by unrestrained settler
violence - backed up by the imperialist state.
In July 1931 the U.S. Empire was electrified by the
news that a secret organization of Afrikan sharecroppers
had been uncovered in Camp Hills, Alabama. Even worse
(from the settler viewpoint) was the fact that these
sharecroppers had engaged in a shoot-out with the local
sheriff and his planter deputies. At a time when an Afrikan
man in the South would take his life in his hands just in
raising his voice to a local settler, this outbreak created settler
panic throughout the colony. Especially when it
became known that the sharecroppers had brought in
Afrikan communist organizers.
1 03 The Alabama Sharecroppers Union had begun