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Labor and the Color Bar in the Jim Crow South (Quote of the Week) Writing when Jim Crow segregation defined the South, veteran American Trotskyist Richard Fraser underlined that the fight to organize unions requires conscious struggle against the racist discrimination wielded by the capitalists to divide labor. While such struggle was key in the building of industrial unions in the North as well as in the mines and steel mills in Birmingham, Alabama, Fraser noted that organizing the “open shop” South had run aground under the leadership of the pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy. Six decades later, organizing the South remains a strategically important task for the labor movement. At each point, the fundamental interests of the industrial working class and of the Negro people are tied together. At no point is this revealed more strongly than in the problems of unionism. Working class solidarity is a mighty antidote to race prejudice. Without the overthrow of prejudice unionism itself is always in danger. This is demonstrated in the great struggles against the giant corporations of auto, rubber, steel. Here the working class was forced, in spite of prejudice, to present a united front to the employers or meet sure defeat. This action was the beginning of the overthrow of race prejudice, just as it was the beginning of industrial unionism.... If industrial unionism could not exist upon a racial basis, neither can it be maintained on a regional basis. The low wages of the South are a constant pressure upon all unions throughout the country. Furthermore, the Bourbon dictatorship is the most consistent and steadfast of all the sources of anti-labor reaction in the country.... The open-shop Jim Crow South is therefore lifted as a Sword of Damocles over the head of the labor movement. But the example of the city of Birmingham proves that it is by no means impossible to organize in the South. Nevertheless, the CIO has failed in all its major attempts. This can only be explained by the limitations of the program of the union bureaucracy. The organization of a labor movement in the South among the basic industrial and agricultural workers there must take its point of departure from a break with capitalist politics and capitalist parties. —Richard S. Fraser, “The Negro Struggle and the Proletarian Revolution” (1953), printed in “In Memoriam—Richard S. Fraser,” Prometheus Research Series No. 3, August 1990
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