Race, Immigration, and Contested Americanism: Black Nativism and the American Labor Movement, 1880–1930

This paper concerns the role of anti-immigrant prejudice in African-American efforts to seek inclusion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century American labor movement. The conservative and craft-oriented American Federation of Labor, which enjoyed more legitimacy than any other labor organization during this period officially rejected discrimination against African Americans, In practice, however, African Americans remained largely excluded from union organization long after immigrants were accepted, based on whiteness. This state of affairs engendered not only immigrant racism, but African American nativism, the latter which featured the argument that African Americans, unlike immigrants, were born in the United States and knew English and American customs, and therefore should be chosen over “foreigners” for good jobs and union membership. This African American adoption of nativism would shape African American responses to exclusion that included a campaign among black thinkers, labor leaders, and newspapers, directed mainly towards the AFL to include them in place of immigrants. Although these arguments had limited effects on the decisions of the AFL leadership, they did create an alternative idea of citizenship, based on something other than whiteness. This paper will draw on African American newspaper editorials from this period, writings of Booker T. Washington and other African American thinkers, AFL records, and the writings of Samuel Gompers, and focus the rhetoric of African American nativism, the responses of the AFL leadership, and the effect of the changing conditions in the 1920s on the African American campaign for inclusion through exclusion.