Today in Labor History July 28, 1917: The Silent Parade took place in New York City, in protest against murders, lynchings, and other violence directed towards African Americans. Organizers set up the parade to protest the East Saint Louis race riots (May-July 1917), when whites murdered up to 200 African Americans, and caused 6,000 black residents to become homeless. While Woodrow Wilson was entering World War I to “make the world safe for democracy,” black Americans were asking when he’d do the same for them.
The Silent March was organized by a coalition of groups, led by the new NAACP. Up to 15,000 participated. Organizers wanted president Wilson to enact anti-lynching legislation. He refused. Wilson appointed numerous racists to his cabinet and was an outspoken defender of segregation on “scientific” grounds. He was also fond of telling racist jokes. As an academic, prior to his political career, he was an apologist for slavery. And he used his authority to actively prevent admitting African Americans into Princeton as students or faculty. Ironically, one of the primary organizers of the Silent March, W.E.B. DuBois, had been an enthusiastic supporter of the Woodrow Wilson presidential candidacy, calling him a “liberal Southerner,” who would deal fairly with Negros.
The East Saint Louis racist pogrom occurred during one of the largest migrations of black workers from the South to the North. Between 1910 and 1920, half a million African Americans migrated north to Chicago, Saint Louis, Detroit, Philadelphia, and other cities. In 1919, there were 38 different racist riots in the U.S., all directed against the black community. The massacre in East Saint Louis began in response to a strike by white employees of the Aluminum Ore Company, after the bosses hired black replacement workers, a common practice of the bosses to divide the working class and weaken unions. Additionally, many of the unions were overtly racist and excluded black workers, including the Aluminum Ore union. To make matters worse, employment agents were going to the South and recruiting African Americans under false pretenses, offering them stable jobs and housing when, in reality, they were being recruited to work as scabs. So, it is likely that many, if not most, of the workers didn’t even know they were being hired as scabs. Regardless, they wouldn’t have been allowed to join the union, either.
Racism by unions and white workers was not inevitable in those days, and it was certainly counterproductive to the aims of working people of all backgrounds and identities. Consider that in 1920, in rural Mingo County, West Virginia, when the coal bosses brought in African American workers as scabs, the UMWA encouraged them to join the union and the strike, and achieved solidarity between white, native-born workers, African Americans from the South, and Italian immigrants. This is portrayed in John Sayles film, Matewan. And by 1916, thanks largely to the superb organizing of Ben Fletcher, all but two of Philadelphia’s docks were controlled by the IWW, uniting a workforce that was 33% Irish, 33% Polish & Lithuanian, and 33% African American. Fletcher also traveled up and down the east coast organizing dockers across race. At that time, roughly 10% of the IWW’s 1 million members were African American.
Read my biography of Fletcher here:
https://michaeldunnauthor.com/2021/05/13/ben-fletcher-and-the-iww-dockers/
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