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UNION SUPPORT FOR INTEGRATION
Octave Blake Says: Unions Working
'Night and Day' To Bring End To Segregation
Central Carolinian (Monday, July 9, 1956)
Labor unions are working day and night and pouring
out the money which they collect in dues to bring an end to racial
segregation, Octave Blake, president of the Cornell Dubilier Electric
corporation, charged in a letter which was distributed to employees of
the firm's Sanford plant over the past week-end.
The eight-page letter dated July 7 and mailed over
Blake's signature contained the firm's complete ideas on the matter of
unionization plus the essential facts regarding time, place and manner
of voting for the representation election set July 20. The election will
determine whether or not the International Brotherhood of Electrical
Workers will become the bargaining agent for employees at the Sanford
plant.
Commenting on the union position on segregation Blake
said:
"With respect to the Union organizers leading
you into their fold, there is another matter which I want to lay before
you very clearly and very frankly. All over the South today there is
deep concern on the question of racial segregation versus integration.
That is a matter on which each person is entitled to his or her own
views. This company does not consider, and I do not consider, that it is
appropriate for the Company to try to influence you one way or another
on this deep and vital issue.
"But the Unions have taken and are taking a very
extreme position on this matter. When the union organizers try to lead
people to believe that the Union does not take any stand one way or
another on integration or segregation and that they consider the matter
as on which should be handled by each community on a local basis, they
are not telling you the truth as to what the Union's real position is.
You are entitled to know, and you should understand the organizers are
misleading you and deceiving you when they pretend that the Unions are
neutral on this matter. The actual truth is that the Unions are working
day and night, and pouring out the money which they collect in dues, in
an effort to eliminate segregation and to bring about integration in the
schools and elsewhere between the white people and the colored people as
rapidly as possible.
"In the case which was before the United States
Supreme Court on the question, the CIO, now merged with the AFL in what
is called the AFL-CIO, filed an official document in which it stated
emphatically and positively that the Union 'supports the elimination of
racial integration . . . from every phase of American Life.' Further the
union urged that segregation should be ended 'forthwith' rather than by
'gradual adjustment.' The document further states that where the 'Unions
have there way, there is like wise no segregation in the use of plant
eating places, locker rooms, rest rooms, etc.'
"You may not have noticed in the newspapers that
the AFL-CIO at its recent convention took $75,000.00 of the dues paid to
it by the people who are its members and gave this money to the national
Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which is the
organization aggressively working for the wiping out of all racial
segregation, both in schools, manufacturing plants and elsewhere."
Other points covered in Blake's letter included the
matter of union dues as he charged that "What they (the organizers)
are after is MONEY -- YOUR MONEY."
Commenting on pay in the local plant Blake said . . .
"Your pay is the best for this line of work in the entire area . .
. It is our hope that this shall continue to be so. You can count on
that without having to pay any union dues to accomplish it."
He also called attention to physical facilities at
the local Cornell-Dubilier plant, stating "while most people work
in the sweltering heat of summer, you have the best of air conditioning.
There is no other plant in our line of work in the whole country, Union
plants or non-union plants--where the people have as good conditions of
work as you have here. Furthermore we hope to expand here in this plant,
which would provide more jobs all along for your friends, relatives and
other people of the community."
Commenting on job security, Blake said that the basis
on which personnel are laid off in times of short orders and work is the
same in the local plant that it is in the company's union plants.
The Cornell-Dubilier President further said that in
the company's union plants the total employment has dropped down to
one-third what it used to be. He said that this was the type of job
security the union gave those employees in exchange for $728,000 in
union dues over the years.
Blake in commenting on conditions at the local
Cornell-Dubilier plant said, 'I do not mean to claim that everything is
just as perfect as it might be here. I do not believe that things have
been improved a lot and we hope to keep on improving them. And I would
like to emphasize to you before, that if there is anything you wish to
call to our attention at any time, there is no reason why you should not
do so and we will sincerely welcome you doing so'.
In concluding his letter Blake said, "In light
of all these considerations, I believe you will surely come to the
conclusion in your own good judgment: That you stand to lose if this
Union were to come in here and that you stand to gain by keeping it
out!"
Asked this (Monday) morning if he wanted to comment further on the
letter Leslie A. Johnson, manger of the local Cornell-Dubilier plant
said that he felt the letter covered the situation and that he had no
further comment of the union organizing activities. posted 24 July 2008
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
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Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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