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joined the strike at all in places like Pittsburgh. And many
who had struck started trickling back to work, afraid of
losing their good jobs. In early November their union, the
Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers,
broke from the strike and started ordering its members
back to work. By late November the mills had 75-80% of
their workforce back. On January 2, 1920, the strike was
officially declared over. Some of the most determined
militants had to leave the industry or return to Europe.
(40)
While the treachery of the labor aristocracy was
very evident in this defeat, the most important event took
place after the strike. During the strike some 30,000
Afrikan workers from the South had been imported by the
steel companies. There was a strong tendency among the
white steelworkers to blame the defeat of the strike on
Afrikan "scabs" or "strikebreakers." And all the more so
because the 10% of the Northern steel workforce that was
Afrikan refused to join the strike. The bourgeoisie was
guiding the white workers in this. Company officials passed
the word that: "Niggers did it." In Pittsburgh one mill
boss announced: "The Nigger saved the day for us." (41)
In fact, although this was widely accepted, it was
clearly untrue. To begin with, 30,000 Afrikan workers
fresh from the South could hardly have replaced 365,000
strikers. There also was by all accounts a tremendous turnover
and desire to quit by those Afrikan workers, and
within a few months supposedly few if any of them remained.
The reason is that most of them were not
"strikebreakers", but workers who had been systematically
deceived and brought to the mills by force. That's why
they left as soon as they could. The testimony during the
strike of 19 year-old Eugene Steward of Baltimore illustrates
this. He was recruited along with 200 others (including
whites) to work in Philadelphia for $4 per day. But
once inside the railroad car they found the doors locked
and guarded by armed company police. They were taken
without food or water to Pittsburgh, unloaded under
guard behind barbed wire, and told that they were to work
at the mills. Seeing that a strike was going on, many of
them wanted to quit. The guards told them that any
Afrikans attempting to leave would be shot down. Steward
did succeed in escaping, but was found and forcibly returned
by the guards. It was only after a second attempt that he
managed to get free. It is obvious that the Afrikan
"strikebreakers" were deliberate propaganda set up by the
capitalists - and swallowed wholesale by the white
workers.
In regard to the Afrikan steelworkers already at
work in the North (and who declined to join the strike), it
should be remembered that this was a white strike. Many
of the striking A.F.L. unions did not admit Afrikans;
those that did so (solely to get Afrikans to honor their
strikes) usually kept Afrikans in "seg" locals. The Euro-
Amerikan leadership of the strike had promised Afrikans
nothing, and plainly meant to keep their promise. That is,
this strike had a definite oppressor nation character to it
and was wholely white-supremacist.
arisen a national movement of settler workers to bar
Afrikans from Northern industry by terroristic attacks.
Between 1917-19 there had been twenty major campaigns
by settler mobs against Afrikan exile communities in the
North. The July, 1917, East St. Louis "race riot" was
organized by that steel city's A.F.L. Central Trades Council,
which had called for "violence" to remove the "growing
menace" of the Afrikan exile community. In two days
of attacks some 39 Afrikans were killed and hundreds injured.
The hand of the capitalists was evident when the
Chicago Tribune editorially praised the white attackers,
and told its readers that Afrikans were "happiest when the
white race asserts its superiority. " (43) Again, we see the
organized Euro-Amerikan workers as the social troops of
one faction or another of the imperialists.
As the steel campaign was gathering steam
throughout 1919 the terroristic attacks on Afrikans increased
as well. In Chicago this was to climax in the infamous
July 1919 "race riot," just two months before the
strike began. Spear's Black Chicago recounts:
"Between 191 7 and 1919, white 'athletic clubs'
assaulted Negroes on the streets and 'neighborhood improvement
societies' bombed Negro homes. During the
Summer of 1919, the guerilla warfare in turn gave way to
open armed conflict - the South Side of Chicago became
a battleground for racial war.. . the bombing of Negro
homes and assaults on Negroes in the streets and parks
became almost everyday occurrences."(44)
On July 27, 1919, an Afrikan teenager was stoned
to death on the 29th St. beach, and after Afrikans attacked
his murderers generalized fighting broke out. It lasted six
days, until the Illinois National Guard was called in. 23
Afrikans were killed and 342 wounded, with over 1,000
homeless after arson attacks (white losses were 15 killed
and 178 wounded). Afrikans were temporarily trapped in
the "Black Belt," unable to go to work or obtain food.
Assisted by the police, Irish, Italian and other white
workers would make night raids into the "Black Belt;"
homes were often attacked. When Afrikans gathered,
police would begin firing into the crowds.
Nor did the white steel strike develop separate
from the continuous struggle between oppressor and oppressed
nations. During the two previous years there had 7 '3 A Mississippi lynching, captt~red by fhr camera.