Macalester College DigitalCommons@Macalester College American Studies Honors Projects American Studies Department 4-26-2016 Racial Uplift in a imJ Crow Local: Black Union Organizing in Minneapolis Hotels 1930-1940 Luke Mielke Macalester College,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/amst_honors Part of the American Studies Commons Recommended Citation Mielke, Luke, "Racial Uplift in a imJ Crow Local: Black Union Organizing in Minneapolis Hotels 1930-1940" (2016). American Studies Honors Projects. Paper 15. http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/amst_honors/15 This Honors Project is brought to you for free and open access by the American Studies Department at DigitalCommons@Macalester College. It has been accepted for inclusion in American Studies Honors Projects by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@Macalester College. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Racial Uplift in a Jim Crow Local: Black Union Organizing in Minneapolis Hotels 1930-1940 Luke Mielke American Studies Honors Thesis Project Adviser: Duchess Harris April 25, 2016 1 Abstract In the 1930s and 1940s, Minneapolis hotels employed two-thirds of all African- Americans working in the city. For black workers in Minneapolis, hotels were a site rife with contradictions: while these jobs offered prestige and union wages, they simultaneously drew upon hotel’s appeal to white customers’ slavery fantasy by promoting an atmosphere of racialized luxury. My research examines how narratives of respectability and racial uplift— generally at odds with the militant working-class politics of unions—became important for black hotel workers in Minneapolis, whose ability to conform to middle-class patriarchal norms was jeopardized by the submissive stereotypes promoted by hotels.