The history between African Americans and unions has been controversial. When the two largest groups of unions, the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Workers, finally merged in 1955, the organization specified their workers’ right against workplace discrimination. If Black workers were able to join, they were more protected against exploitation at the hands of racist employers. But local unions and individual white unionists, especially in the South, were slow or unwilling to integrate at all. Union segregation on a local level continued throughout the Jim Crow era, though after the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, federal law made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission gave all workers a federal system through which they could file complaints against discriminatory employers and union management.

Throughout the twentieth century, activists for organized labor and civil rights fought for the rights of working-class Americans. Leaders such as Coretta Scott King, AFL-CIO President George Meany, and A. Philip Randolph collaborated on strategies such as strikes, marches, and boycotts to raise funds, support politicians, and engage their communities. The goals of the two movements often overlapped: to fight for protection against economic exploitation for some of the most vulnerable people in the country.

After World War II and throughout the Civil Rights Movement, the AFL-CIO pushed their organizers to travel to the South to unionize the workers who toiled in mills and factories often owned by northern businessmen. But employers knew they could exploit the deep-seated racism and anti-Communism of their white workers to stop them from unionizing, and they were able to keep their employees in conflict with each other and hostile to outsiders. As a consequence of these prejudices, unions never gained a stronghold in the American South.

This primary source set uses letters, newspaper articles, reports, posters, surveys, and other texts to explore the relationship between organized labor and the Civil Rights Movement.