Saturday, January 9, 2010: 11:50 AM
Edward D (Hyatt)
In a 1972 appeal to an AFL-CIO convention, the director of People United to Save Humanity, Jesse Jackson, Jr., bemoaned organized labor’s departure from the movement against racial injustice. While invoking the interracialism of CIO union locals from the 1930s and 1940s, Jackson implored the Black freedom movement to “win back” the support of white “blue collar workers” who had supported “law and order” candidates like Nixon in the 1968 elections.[1] My project asks how such attempts to invoke the multi-racial alliances and political ideals of previous decades were imagined and received by activists in Black Chicago and throughout the Midwest during the late 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. For instance, the ideals of Black-led and union-supported movements serve as important antecedents to the politics of the mainstream civil rights establishment of the 1950s and 1960s which opposed segregation and later sought equal economic employment opportunities for African Americans and peoples of color. At the same time, Jackson ’s perspective spoke to generational and political fissures that existed within and between both the labor and civil rights movements. The currency of understanding such fissures is underscored by Jackson’s own conflicted relationship with Barack Obama’s recent Chicago-based presidential campaign which offers a similar set of questions about generational relationships. Using sources located in Chicago-area labor and community archives, African American publications with major links to the Old Left such as Freedomways magazine and Black World/Negro Digest, as well as first-hand interviews with movement veterans, I will demonstrate how politics born in earlier decades survived, but were also transformed by the repressive anti-communism of the 1950s in order to be related in different ways to activists primarily involved in the Black insurgencies of the 1960s and 1970s.