On Meany's watch at the helm of the AFL-CIO, …organized labor would find it increasingly difficult to relate sympathetically to a militant civil rights movement that challenged the existing relations of power through mass mobilization of the grassroots. Although AFL-CIO leaders spoke the language of racial equality, they were simply unwilling to launch a frontal assault on the deeply rooted patterns of inequality in trades and industries where labor's strength was greatest.
Professor Bruce Nelson, Labor Historian, Dartmouth College,Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality, p. 232
No NAACP employment campaign better demonstrates the growing chasm between organized labor and the Association than that directed by Hill against the discriminatory practices of the ILGWU, whose president, David Dubinsky, was an icon and a legend among liberals, socialists, and trade unionists. Dubinsky had heroically led his constituency through the fires of employer violence and general obduracy for four decades, while backing numerous reformist causes with
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Publication information:
Book title: Freedom's Sword: The NAACP and the Struggle against Racism in America, 1909-1969.
Contributors: Gilbert Jonas - Author.
Publisher: Routledge.
Place of publication: New York.
Publication year: 2005.
Page number: 265.
This material is protected by copyright and, with the exception of fair use, may not be further copied, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means.
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