The Dissertation Committee for Zachary Andrew Montz certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation “Negro Laborers to the Crossroads:” Organized Labor and the Traditions of Black Unionism in Houston, Texas, 1935 – 1964 Committee: ________________________________ H. W. Brands, Supervisor ________________________________ Don Carleton ________________________________ William Forbath ________________________________ Laurie Green ________________________________ Tasha Philpot “Negro Laborers to the Crossroads:” Organized Labor and the Traditions of Black Unionism in Houston, Texas, 1935 – 1964 by Zachary Andrew Montz, B.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin December, 2013 “Negro Laborers to the Crossroads:” Organized Labor and the Traditions of Black Unionism in Houston, Texas, 1935 – 1964 Zachary Andrew Montz, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2013 Supervisor: H.W. Brands On July 2, 1964, the members of the all-black Independent Metal Workers Local 2 at the Hughes Tool Company in Houston, Texas struck a major blow for the rights of black workers by securing an order from the National Labor Relations Board prohibiting their employer and all- white IMW Local 1 from practicing racial discrimination in union membership policies and in company contracts. The NLRB decision set a national precedent in favor of racial equality in industrial employment. It was the culmination of three decades of effort by black oil and steel workers in and around Houston to use the institutions of organized labor – unions, federal labor agencies, and labor law – to secure substantive economic gains and equality of opportunity, rights, and treatment at work. The long fight against employment discrimination in Houston met opposition both from employers and from white workers reluctant to surrender their positions of marginal privilege. It also split the city’s black community on the labor question. Groups of black workers, civil rights activists, lawyers, and community leaders battled over fundamental issues of strategy and over the proper relationship between black workers and the labor movement, their white counterparts, iii and employers. There were two broad factions: one committed to a social democratic vision of working class advance through the biracial unions of the CIO, the other mistrustful of white workers and labor leaders, favorably disposed towards employers, and dedicated to promoting black self-determination and autonomy through “independent” labor organizations. Drawing upon the records of unions, the NAACP, and the federal labor bureaucracy, as well as Houston’s black newspapers, this dissertation pays particular attention to the many mid- level organizers and activists involved in union campaigns in the 1930s and 1940s and charts the turn towards the courts and the NLRB in the 1950s and 1960s as black workers disappointed with the labor movement fought to secure their rights. In doing so, it aims both to explore the relationship between black workers and organized labor and to assess the strengths and shortcomings of biracial movements, democratic institutions, and the law as means for promoting equality. iv Table of Contents Introduction: Labor, Law, and the Traditions of Black Labor Unionism …………………….…. 1 Chapter One: Work, Race, and the Origins of Unionism in Oil and Steel …………………….. 34 Chapter Two: Industrial Democracy, the CIO, and Black Independent Unionism in Houston, 1935 – 1940 …………..………..………………………………. 84 Chapter Three: Union Power and Black Rights in the Wartime State …..……………….…… 147 Chapter Four: White Majorities, the “Rights of Others:” and the Limits of Biracial Unionism …………..………………………………………….. 210 Chapter Five: Labor, Law, and Black Rights: Houston’s Campaign Against Union Discrimination, 1952 – 1964 ….……………………………………… 241 Conclusion: Hughes Tool, Title VII, and Equal Opportunity in an Era of Union Decline …………..……………………..…..……………………….. 309 Bibliography …………………………………….…………………………………......……... 320 v Introduction: Labor, Law, and the Traditions of Black Unionism The front page of the July 3, 1964 New York Times announced promising news for America’s black workers. In a three to two decision, the National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency overseeing labor unions, ruled that the all-white Local 1 of the Independent Metal Workers union at the Hughes Tool Company in Houston, Texas, had violated federal law by barring black workers from membership and by contracting with the company to keep African Americans out of skilled jobs and apprenticeship programs. The ruling marked the first time that the NLRB had prohibited unions from discriminating on racial grounds. Robert L. Carter, the lead attorney in the Hughes complaint and the general counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, called the decision “almost revolutionary” for the precedent it set prohibiting segregated job, pay, and seniority classifications and racially exclusive apprenticeships, devices that unions and employers across the nation had used to lock black workers into low paying and less desirable jobs.1 The charges against the IMW union had been filed in 1962 by veteran Hughes Tool employee Ivory Davis after his application for an apprenticeship in the tool and die department had been rejected. In twenty years with the company, Davis had become an official with IMW Local 2, the segregated black counterpart to Local 1, but had risen no higher in job status than his present materials handler position. Tool and die work, like all skilled jobs, was reserved for whites, who made up roughly seventy-five percent of the workers at Hughes. The segregation of the company’s workforce had not changed much since Howard Hughes, Sr. first hired three black workers in 1914 to fuel furnaces, carry materials, and sweep up around the thirty-three 1 IMW, Local 1 and IMW, Local 2 and Hughes Tool Company, party of interest., 147 N.L.R.B. 1574 (1964). New York Times, July 3, 1964. 1 white craftsmen who produced the company’s signature rotary oil drilling bit in a small shop on the north end of Houston’s downtown. As Hughes Tool grew to employ thousands of workers in the subsequent half century, segregation remained at the heart of the company’s labor system, favored by management and kept in place by contracts with the IMW, a rubber-stamp union that rarely questioned the company’s designs on the workforce. Although the IMW, an independent union that existed only at Hughes, had throughout its tenure acted as an enabler of management prerogative, it was certified by and subject to the NLRB, just like the larger and better-known unions affiliated with the AFL-CIO. In 1964, the IMW became the back door through which federal nondiscrimination policy came into Hughes Tool. By barring discrimination in union rules and contracts, Robert Carter proclaimed after the victory, Hughes Tool “[gave] Negroes a new tool in their quest for equal opportunity.” The NLRB had wedded unions to the cause of nondiscrimination by creating an affirmative duty to dismantle segregated employment systems and to represent the interests of racial minorities in the workplace on par with those of whites. The decision had, in short, established nondiscrimination as one of the guiding principles of the nation’s labor policy, some three decades after the Wagner Act had established labor’s place in the American state and industrial economy. From July 1964 onward, where unions failed to meet this responsibility black workers now had straightforward recourse through the NLRB, which could remedy the most obvious discriminatory practices with cease-and-desist orders, or in extreme cases, threaten unions with decertification.2 Relatively little historical attention has been paid to the landmark Hughes Tool decision, or to the efforts of the black workers, activists, and lawyers that brought it about. That the precedent-setting NLRB decision originated in Houston, however, would have been of little 2 Ibid. 2 surprise to contemporary labor and civil rights activists. Over the previous decade, black union members in the city’s steel shops and oil refineries, attorneys, and local NAACP officials had been on the leading edge of the challenge to workplace discrimination. Their campaign was prosecuted on several fronts: in negotiations with union locals and officials, in federal administrative agencies, and in the courts. The legal efforts of black Houstonians in particular drew the attention of Robert Carter and the NAACP, who acted alongside the Houston forces to bring cases before the NLRB challenging discrimination by labor unions. With varying degrees of success, the two groups advanced arguments rooted in labor and constitutional law designed to compel unions to respect and represent the interests of their black and white members equally. In 1964, those arguments finally made their full weight felt on behalf of Ivory Davis. That the Hughes Tool precedent, and, more generally, the legal campaign against union discrimination that led up to it, remains a relatively minor part of histories of the civil rights and labor movements is undoubtedly due in part to the somewhat technical nature of labor law and the arcane administrative venues in which parts of this campaign were waged, but its continued obscurity is also rooted in historical coincidence.3 Despite the great promise of