sakaisettlersocr

the early 1830's, continued and gathered momentum. In
the most celebrated single case, Lewis Douglass (the son of
Frederick Douglass) was repeatedly denied admission to
the Typographers' Union. A printer at the Government
Printing Office, Douglass was not only denied by the local,
but his appeals were turned down by two successive conventions
of the Typographers' Union - and even by the
entire N.L.U. convention.
It is important to realize how strongly and overwhelmingly
Euro-Amerikan workers in the Civil War
period supported the concept of a settler Empire-particularly
as applied to guaranteeing white workers the right
to annex the jobs that Afrikan, Chinese, Mexicano, and
other oppressed labor had created. Of the 130 labor
newspapers started between 1863-73, in the great upsurge
of white labor, exactly one (1) supported even bourgeois
democratic equality for Afrikans.(49) These insurgent
journals represented the "best," the most advanced tradeunionists
in the settler Empire. Yet only one out of onehundred-and-thirty
supported democratic rights for
Afrikans.
That lone journal, the Boston Daily Evening Voice
of the Boston printing trades, opposed President Johnson,
supported Afrikan admission to the unions, backed the demand
for free land for Afrikans, and so on. Such principled
views lost them so many subscribers that, in a last vain
effort to stay afloat, the editors promised their readers that
the newspaper would stop writing about Reconstruction
and the problems of Afrikans (saying that anyway that
issue "is practically solved").(50) Much more typical was
the St. Louis Daily Press, again an alternative newspaper
started by local printers during a strike. The Press was
quite "progressive"; that is, it advocated the Eight-Hour
Day, the Irish Revolution, equal rights for white women,
the unity of European workers around the world-even
printing long Marxist documents sent by the First International
in Europe. It also opposed democratic rights for
Afrikans, and called on white labor to drive "the niggers"
out of all desirable jobs.(51)
No one is above the reality of history. Even the
masses themselves are tested in the crucible, forged,
tempered or broken in the class struggle. And not in side
skirmishes or paper debates either, but in great battles
upon which the future waits. The attempted rising of the
Afrikan colonial masses - protracted, bitter, involving
millions of desperate combatants - was such a pivotal
event.
As the war raged on, carrying with it the hopes of
whatever democratic forces existed within the Empire,
thousands upon thousands of Afrikans gave their lives. In
the growing defeats eventually the entire Afrikan Nation
paid the blood price of reenslavement. How should we be
impressed, then, when we learn that in that how Northern
white labor was trying to tell everyone that the real, main
issue was-a shorter work day! If it were not so cowardly
and treacherous, it would pass as comic relief.