Source: Joshua Freeman et al., Who Built America?
Working People and the Nation’s Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 11: p. 140; originally from U.S. Strike Commission, Report on the Chicago Strike of June–July 1894 (1895).
Copyright 2014 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial Review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
Sources 37
No man or woman of us all can ever hope to own one inch of George Pull- man’s land. Why even the streets are his. . . .
Pullman, both the man and the town, is an ulcer on the body politic. He owns the houses, the schoolhouses, the churches of God. . . . The revenue he derives from these, the wages he pays out with one hand—the Pullman Palace Car Com- pany, he takes back with the other—the Pullman Land Association. He is able by this to bid under any contract car shop in the country. His competitors in business, to meet this, must reduce the wages of their men. . . . And thus the merry war— the dance of skeletons bathed in human tears—goes on, and it will go on, broth- ers, forever, unless you, the American Railway Union, stop it; end it; crush it out.
5 This letter was written by an African American iron worker at the Black Diamond Steel Works. Colored Workmen and a Strike (1887)
To the Editor:
As a strike is now in progress at the Black Diamond Steel Works, where many of our race are employed, the colored people hereabouts feel a deep interest in its final outcome. As yet few colored men have taken part in it, it having been thus far thought unwise to do so. It is true our white brothers, who joined the Knights of Labor and organized the strike without confer- ring with, or in any way consulting us, now invite us to join with them and help them to obtain the desired increase in wages and control by the Knights of Labor of the works. But as we were not taken into their schemes at its inception, and as it was thought by them that no trouble would be experi- enced in obtaining what they wanted without our assistance, we question very much the sincerity and honesty of this invitation. Our experience as a race with these organizations has, on the whole, not been such as to give us either great satisfaction or confidence in white men’s fidelity. For so often after we have joined them, and the desired object has been attained, we have discovered that sinister and selfish motives were the whole and only cause that led them to seek us as members.
A few years ago a number of colored men working at this mill were in- duced to join the Amalgamated Association, thereby relinquishing the posi- tions which they held at these works. They were sent to Beaver Falls, Pa., to work in a mill there controlled by said Association, and the men there, brothers too, mark you, refused to work with them because they were black. It is true Mr. Jaret, then chairman of that Association, sat down upon those skunks, but when that mill closed down, and those men went out from there
Source: Philip S. Foner and Ronald L. Lewis, eds., Black Workers: A Documentary History from Colonial Times to the Present (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), pp. 220–221; originally from New York Freeman, August 13, 1887.
Copyright 2014 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial Review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
Chapter 2 Using Primary Sources: Industrialization and the Condition of Labor38
to seek employment in other mills governed by the Amalgamated, while the men did not openly refuse to work with them, they managed always to find some pretext or excuse to keep from employing them.
Now, Mr. Editor, I am not opposed to organized labor. God forbid that I should be when its members are honest, just and true! But when I join any society, I want to have pretty strong assurance that I will be treated fairly. I do not want to join any organization the members of which will refuse to work by my side because the color of my skin happens to be of a darker hue than their own. Now what the white men in these organizations should and must do, if they want colored men to join with and confide in them, is to give them a square deal—give them a genuine white man’s chance—and my word for it they will flock into them like bees into a hive. If they will take Mr. B. F. Stewart’s advice! “take the colored man by the hand and convince him by actual fact that you will be true to him and not a traitor to your pledge,” he will be found with them ever and always; for there are not under heaven men in whose breasts beat truer hearts than in the breast of the Negro.\