A New Working Class

The Legacies of Public-Sector Employment in the Civil Rights Movement

Jane Berger

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780812253450, 9780812253450
• eBook ISBN: 9780812298086
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia afroamericana

For decades, civil rights activists fought against employment discrimination and for a greater role for African Americans in municipal decision-making. As their influence in city halls across the country increased, activists took advantage of the Great Society—and the government jobs it created on the local level—to advance their goals.

A New Working Class traces efforts by Black public-sector workers and their unions to fight for racial and economic justice in Baltimore. The public sector became a critical job niche for Black workers, especially women, a largely unheralded achievement of the civil rights movement. A vocal contingent of Black public-sector workers pursued the activists' goals from their government posts and sought to increase and improve public services. They also fought for their rights as workers and won union representation. During an era often associated with deindustrialization and union decline, Black government workers and their unions were just getting started.

During the 1970s and 1980s, presidents from both political parties pursued policies that imperiled these gains. Fighting funding reductions, public-sector workers and their unions defended the principle that the government has a responsibility to provide for the well-being of its residents. Federal officials justified their austerity policies, the weakening of the welfare state and strengthening of the carceral state, by criminalizing Black urban residents—including government workers and their unions. Meanwhile, workers and their unions also faced off against predominately white local officials, who responded to austerity pressures by cutting government jobs and services while simultaneously offering tax incentives to businesses and investing in low-wage, service-sector jobs. The combination of federal and local policies increased insecurity in hyper-segregated and increasingly over-policed low-income Black neighborhoods, leaving residents, particularly women, to provide themselves or do without services that public-sector workers had fought to provide.

CHAPTER 1

“Boom Times” in Baltimore?

In early 1951, the New York Times predicted “boom times” for the Baltimore region. The business community had already identified 1950 as its best year since World War II, and executives in several industries planned to expand production to meet demand for defense orders, making the new year even better. Unemployment in Maryland was at its lowest level since the war’s end, and industrial employers expected to have to search out of state to fill a projected ten thousand positions for skilled workers. Many residents of Baltimore shared in the prosperity the city’s boom times created. Studies of local economic activity revealed that they were celebrating the flush times with shopping sprees and splurging on big-ticket items. Retail sales were on the rise, as was demand for electricity to power the many consumer products that had flooded the market after the war, items such as televisions, washing machines, and refrigerators. Area residents were also taking to the roads with increasing frequency. Car registrations were up, and gasoline consumption was rising quickly. For growing numbers, cars sustained suburban lifestyles as city natives abandoned Baltimore entirely for a new start.¹

But not everyone in Baltimore benefited equally from the city’s boom times. Persistent employment discrimination kept Black city residents on the margins or at the bottom of the city’s industrial economy. Anna “Nan” Butler’s family was representative. In 1950, she was thirty-seven years old and the mother of four. Although as a child she had sometimes imagined for herself a career in nursing, the aspiration had proven difficult to achieve in Jim Crow Baltimore. Instead, like most Black women of her generation, Butler turned to domestic work. She might have preferred the life of a housewife, attending to her own children and home instead of juggling family responsibilities with the demands of cleaning and caring for others. But her husband’s income as a laborer, the occupational category that included the largest number of Black men in Baltimore during the first half of the twentieth century, could not sustain their family. So Butler cleaned for white families to help make ends meet. Her wages were low—minimum-wage laws excluded domestic workers—but she did what she could to boost them. When she took on new clients, she exaggerated prevailing wage rates and sometimes won herself a raise. The small victories were important but not enough to lift her family out of poverty. “We were poor,” one of her daughters recalled, but then added pensively, “but we didn’t know we were poor. Everyone was poor.”² Her recollection was not far off. During Baltimore’s boom times, when employers anticipated recruiting relatively highly paid skilled workers from out of state, well over half of the city’s Black residents lived in poverty.³

To combat widespread insecurity, during the postwar era, civil rights leaders worked relentlessly to incorporate African Americans into their city’s boom times. The task was daunting. Known as the nation’s northernmost southern city and southernmost northern city, Baltimore had an industrialized, Jim Crow economy, and there were few forms of discrimination Black residents did not confront. Nevertheless, building on campaigns with roots in the 1930s, African American leaders endeavored to improve conditions. They took on Jim Crow segregation and sometimes met with success.⁴ Simultaneously, they remained unwavering in their determination to fight employment discrimination. The ticket to the city’s boom times lay in integrating the mainstream economy and thereby winning for African Americans both better jobs and greater protection from the nation’s welfare state—access to Social Security and unemployment insurance, the right to join a union and earn the minimum wage. Such protections were buoying the economic fortunes of many white workers but did not consistently extend to laborers, domestic workers, and others in the precarious jobs often filled by African Americans. The health of the local—and national—economy had long depended on a racially segmented labor market in which whites confined African Americans to low-wage jobs. Change did not come easily. Despite some very hard-won and important civil rights victories, the system largely remained in place through the 1950s. As a result, gains accrued by many in the white working class during Baltimore’s boom times remained out of reach for many Black families.

The marginalization of African Americans in Baltimore’s vibrant postwar economy had far-reaching and also gendered implications. For men, their concentration in laboring positions made them particularly vulnerable to efforts by manufacturers to mechanize production. Technological changes meant that new machines rather than men increasingly did the grunt work on the city’s job sites, which saved on labor costs but increased the Black male unemployment rate. What is more, by the postwar years, Baltimore was no longer the magnet for industrial employers that it once was. New firms often located in the city’s suburbs, and manufacturers with aging plants in the city increasingly found it cost-effective to move elsewhere. Mechanization and early deindustrialization threatened to erode the city’s manufacturing base before Black men had won full inclusion. Meanwhile, for many Black women like Butler, economic hardship meant juggling the demands of paid employment with family obligations—obligations that the nation’s welfare state was easing for white women but that substandard housing, inadequate sanitation services, separate and unequal access to health care, and other vestiges of Jim Crow made all the more challenging. To be sure, the momentum achieved by Baltimore’s civil rights leaders during the 1950s paved the way for important changes to come. Nevertheless, during an exceptional era in the history of American capitalism during which many workers shared to an unprecedented level in the profits of their employers, Baltimore’s boom times did not extend far into Black communities.

“A Ready Supply of Common Labor”: Civil Rights Leaders and Black Employment

As postwar civil rights leaders attempted to dismantle the Jim Crow-dominated system in Baltimore, they encountered considerable resistance. Local white power brokers, as well as much of the white population more generally, shared a deep commitment to maintaining the city’s rigid racial hierarchy. During the 1940s, Baltimore became the nation’s sixth largest city, and by the war’s end, the Black population had reached about two hundred thousand. Although African Americans accounted for approximately 20 percent of the city’s residents, which was a larger fraction than found in most other industrial cities, they wielded little political or economic power. The trappings of white supremacy were everywhere. African Americans held no elected offices; Jim Crow segregation dictated where people could and could not go; residential segregation prevailed; and most Black workers had menial jobs.⁵ Civil rights activists had a lot to tackle.

The key to improving the economic fortunes of African Americans lay in moving Black men into and upward in the city’s industrial sector, many activists believed. Despite its location below the Mason-Dixon line, Baltimore resembled economically cities in the Northeast and the Midwest rather than cities in the South. Although Baltimore’s economic roots were in commerce, by the start of the twentieth century an extensive rail system had attracted manufacturers to the city. The Baltimore port, which became one of the largest and most important on the U.S. Atlantic coast, fueled the industrial development. A wave of mergers early in the twentieth century consumed many locally owned firms and added nationally recognizable names to the city’s business directories, and so Baltimore became known as a city of branch plants. Western Electric and Glenn Martin Aircrafts opened facilities in the area during the 1920s, as did Procter and Gamble, Coca-Cola, Montgomery Ward, McCormick Spice, and American Sugar. By the 1930s, Bethlehem Steel, which had purchased mills in Sparrows Point just outside the city in 1916, was Baltimore’s largest employer, and it remained so after the war. Bethlehem Steel also ran shipyards at “the Point” and in South Baltimore. General Motors began operations during the 1930s just outside the city, and by the start of World War II, General Electric and Westinghouse also had Baltimore branches. As in most northeastern cities, Baltimore’s economy was diversified. Commerce remained important, and the city had a small but significant banking and financial sector; the contemporary firms Legg Mason and T. Rowe Price were products of the city. In 1940, 40 percent of Baltimore’s workforce labored in trade and service jobs. The city’s economic diversity persisted through the postwar years, making Baltimore representative of similarly sized cities in the industrial belt. Nevertheless, the industrial sector powered the city’s economy.⁶

The exploitation of Black labor long had been critical to the city’s economic growth. At the start of the Civil War, Baltimore had been home to the largest population of free African Americans in the nation, and the city had been known as the Black capital of the United States. But Baltimore’s tradition of free Black labor had hardly prevented whites from excluding most African American men from skilled jobs and the lucrative trades after the Civil War. And white employers used racism to justify low wages for Black workers. In fact, during the Great Depression, business boosters made the availability of inexpensive African American labor a selling point in a campaign to attract investors to the city. “The percentage of Negroes is 17.7 affording a ready supply of common labor,” the Baltimore Industrial Bureau touted in an advertisement.⁷ White employers confined Black men to low-wage positions to reduce labor costs and also to prevent unionization. In some cases, employers intentionally denied Black workers regular jobs so as to hire them as scabs during strikes. Employers’ manipulation of race limited most Black men to poverty-level wages. It also impeded labor organizing. By World War II, Baltimore’s labor movement was notoriously weak.⁸

Wartime labor demands had opened opportunities for Black workers, and civil rights leaders pursued them assertively. The percentage of Black men employed in the industrial sector rose from 7 percent to 17 percent. Black women made gains as well. Although still largely confined to low-wage service positions, the percentage engaged in domestic service dropped from 70 to less than 45.⁹ While important, the changes did not go far enough. Discrimination continued to confine most African American workers to the least secure and most unprotected jobs in the city. As the white director of Baltimore’s Department of Public Welfare, T. J. S. Waxter, explained in 1944, “Perhaps the greatest handicap under which Negroes live in Baltimore is in the restriction of job opportunities in many areas. Numerous concerns in the city will not employ Negroes for semi-skilled, skilled and professional work.” Despite wartime improvements, he noted, “It is still true … that the overwhelming number of Negroes find employment in unskilled work and domestic service.”¹⁰ In the midst of the city’s modern industrial economy, most African Americans struggled to get by in low-wage jobs.

“The Constitution Meant Just What It Said”

Postwar civil rights activists knew well the challenges they faced. Many who engaged in postwar campaigns for jobs began their activist careers during the 1930s. The people and organizations behind Baltimore’s Depression-era and wartime civil rights efforts were numerous. Black neighborhoods housed an extensive network of institutions, some of which had roots in antebellum America. Black churches had an especially long and important history in the city. In Sunday-morning sermons, clergy across the city—some lecturing in the stern tone of patriarchs, others fired by the passion of revelation—blended spiritual guidance and political advocacy. Although church members differed in their assessments of the responses required to pernicious racism in the city, from their ranks emerged many of the leaders and foot soldiers of the city’s civil rights movement. Meanwhile, clergy members played important roles in interracial relations.¹¹

Baltimore also boasted a critically important Black-owned press. The Afro-American, a newspaper purchased by John Murphy in 1890 and edited from the 1920s through 1967 by his son, Carl, was the most important Black business in the city. The paper covered events of interest to its national African American readership in editions published in cities across the country. Its Baltimore edition included stories on local politics. The paper’s editorial page provided readers with perspectives on both international and domestic events. It also included trenchant insights into Baltimore’s ongoing civil rights struggles, battles in which Murphy and his paper were often intimately involved. The editor, who held degrees from Howard and Harvard Universities as well as Friedrich Schiller University Jena in Germany, was a member of the national board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). During the 1930s, he helped to revive the city’s branch of the organization, which had become dormant during the 1920s. No resident in Baltimore had the ear of as many of the city’s Black citizens as Carl Murphy.¹²

Murphy’s paper was hardly limited to political content. Articles in the Afro-American kept readers updated on the goings-on within the city’s many civic and social organizations, including numerous fraternal groups, sororities, lodges, and other private clubs. Readers could also look to the paper for news of the latest events at Morgan State and Coppin State, two historically Black colleges that had graduated many of the city’s African American professionals. In addition, the Afro-American covered the cotillion dances, elaborate weddings, overseas escapades, and other exploits of the small but notoriously class-conscious who’s who of Black Baltimore. The paper included articles on the city’s vibrant cultural scene as well, reporting on the hottest acts appearing in clubs on Pennsylvania Avenue in West Baltimore, the heart of the city’s African American arts scene. And the paper kept readers current on all forms of sporting events, providing scores and analyses of high school, college, amateur, and professional matchups. In other words, the sources of the energy and perseverance that sustained the city’s civil rights activists through difficult battles was described in the paper’s articles that were not related to civil rights.

From the mid-1930s onward, many issues of the paper did include news of local civil rights activism. The Baltimore chapter of the NAACP led many of the battles. The organization, the second NAACP branch in the nation, received its charter in 1913. During its early years, members spearheaded fights against lynching in Maryland and campaigned against housing segregation laws that the Baltimore City Council repeatedly but unsuccessfully attempted to enact. Concerned about African Americans’ access to jobs and public services, local NAACP leaders also protested rampant employment discrimination in the municipal government.¹³

Lillie May Jackson was a primary force behind the resurgence of the Baltimore NAACP during the mid-1930s, and she remained at the organization’s helm until 1970. Born in Baltimore in 1889, Jackson graduated from Coppin Teachers College. She worked in the city’s public schools, and then married Kieffer A. Jackson, an exhibitor of religious films. Together the couple had four children. Lillie May Jackson was devoutly religious and not a little righteous. She understood her efforts in the NAACP to be God’s work, and she grew the Baltimore branch of the organization into one of the nation’s biggest primarily by working within the city’s Black religious communities. In keeping with the ideology that motivated many African American activists of her generation and class, Jackson asserted that it was her “job to help [her] people and lift them up.” Yet she also believed strongly that it was her responsibility to “prove that the Constitution meant just what it said.”¹⁴ She valued action, and upon assuming the leadership of the Baltimore NAACP, she replaced some on the organization’s “polite preacher-teacher” board with rep...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction. Public-Sector Workers and the Battle over Cities
• 1. “Boom Times” in Baltimore?
• 2. “A New Mood” Is Spreading: The Great Society as Job Creation
• 3. “We Had to Fight to Get This”: Antipoverty Workers Take on City Hall
• 4. “Better Wages and Job Conditions with Dignity”: Unionizing the Public Sector
• 5. “A Posture of Advocacy for the Poor”: Fighting Poverty in an Era of Austerity
• 6. “The Hell-Raising Period Is Over”: New Federalism in Baltimore
• 7. “Polishing the Apple While the Core Rots”: Carter and the Cities
• 8. “A Tourist Town at the Expense of the Poor”: The Making of Two Baltimores
• 9. “A Revolving Door for Impoverished People”: Reaganomics and American Cities
• 10. “There’s Tragedy on Both Sides of the Layoffs”: Privatization and the Urban Crisis
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments