Comment on “The Racial Politics of Progressive Americanism: New Deal Liberalism and the Subordination of Black Workers in the UAW”

2005 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-104
Author(s):  
Rogers M. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Racial Politics ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
Black Workers ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
United Automobile Workers ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
Formal Equality ◽  
Charles Williams

My comments on Charles Williams' “Racial Politics of Progressive Americanism” can be brief, because it is an excellent essay and I could not agree more with its central argument. Williams demonstrates that, even though United Automobile Workers (UAW) leaders used the language of racial equality to support some civil rights advances, Walter Reuther and others also invoked a merely formal equality to deny power to blacks thought to be allied with Communists, and to sustain the support of anti-black workers. They pretended that African Americans were an ethnic group like those of many European-descended Americans, ignoring the enormous differences in the oppression black Americans had long experienced and continued to experience (and still experience). In these ways, an Americanist language, arguably a “liberal” language, of equal rights worked against the racial equality it purported to honor. On these points, I am fully persuaded.

The Racial Politics of Progressive Americanism: New Deal Liberalism and the Subordination of Black Workers in the UAW

2005 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Williams
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Racial Politics ◽  
Foreign Country ◽  
General Motors ◽  
Black Workers ◽  
American Federation Of Labor ◽  
American Federation ◽  
Congress Of Industrial Organizations ◽  
Industrial Organizations ◽  
United Automobile Workers

In February 1937, members of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) celebrated their pioneering victory over General Motors by waving American flags as they marched out of Fisher Body and paraded through the streets of Flint, Michigan. Later that year, as the UAW turned to organizing Ford's massive River Rouge plant, the Ford edition of the United Automobile Worker described the complex as a foreign country and called on workers to “win this for America” and “win the war for democracy in River Rouge!” When a successful strike finally led to union recognition and an NLRB election in 1941, the UAW urged Rouge workers to “keep faith with America” and its greatest leaders, Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, by voting for the inclusive unionism of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) over the un-American alternative of the American Federation of Labor (AFL).

Transformations: The New Deal through the 1950s

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Woloch
Keyword(s):  
Women Workers ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Federal Court ◽  
Labor Standards ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Single Sex ◽  
Fair Labor Standards Act ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The New Deal

This chapter traces the changes in federal and state protective policies from the New Deal through the 1950s. In contrast to the setbacks of the 1920s, the New Deal revived the prospects of protective laws and of their proponents. The victory of the minimum wage for women workers in federal court in 1937 and the passage in 1938 of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which extended labor standards to men, represented a peak of protectionist achievement. This achievement rested firmly on the precedent of single-sex labor laws for which social feminists—led by the NCL—had long campaigned. However, “equal rights” gained momentum in the postwar years, 1945–60. By the start of the 1960s, single-sex protective laws had resumed their role as a focus of contention in the women's movement.

A Typology of Moral Progress

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allen Buchanan
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Moral Reasoning ◽  
Moral Status ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Premarital Sex ◽  
Moral Progress ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
The World ◽  
Moral Point

This chapter identifies a number of developments that are candidates for moral progress: abolition of the Atlantic chattel slavery, improvements in civil rights for minorities, equal rights for women, better treatment of (some) non-human animals, and abolition of the cruellest punishments in most parts of the world. This bottom-up approach is then used to construct a typology of moral progress, including improvements in moral reasoning, recognition of the moral standing or equal basic moral status of beings formerly thought to lack them, improvements in understandings of the domain of justice, the recognition that some behaviors formerly thought to be morally impermissible (such as premarital sex, masturbation, lending money at interest, and refusal to die “for king and country”) can be morally permissible, and improvements in understandings of morality itself. Finally, a distinction is made between improvements from a moral point of view and moral progress in the fullest sense.

American Federalism and the Civil Rights Act of 1875

1976 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 313-328
Author(s):  
S. G. F. Spackman
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Discrimination ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
Legislative History ◽  
Civil Rights Act ◽  
Publicly Supported ◽  
American Federalism

Charles Sumner's Supplementary Civil Rights Bill, which after a tortuous legislative history became law as the Civil Rights Act of 1875, was intended to spell out in specific terms the procedural guarantees of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments and so to outlaw racial discrimination in public accommodation, entertainment and transport, in juries, churches and publicly supported schools and charities. The measure was not only the culmination of Sumner's life-long efforts on behalf of the Blacks, but also the only comprehensive attempt made by Congress during Reconstruction to secure racial equality. Yet the purpose of the Act was undermined even before its passage by die racial ambivalence and political calculations of its supporters, while the challenge it made to traditional concepts of American federalism was defeated in 1883 by the Supreme Court's decision that it was unconstitutional. The nature and extent of this challenge, however, becomes apparent only in the context of the pressures that shaped Republican legislation.

Behind the atomic curtain: School desegregation and territoriality in the early Cold War

2012 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-139
Author(s):  
James T. Sparrow
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
National Security ◽  
Gender Equity ◽  
School Desegregation ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
Labor Rights ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
Red Flags ◽  
Civil Rights Organizations

The early Cold War was, infamously, a time of political retrenchment, when anticommunists exploited popular fears and national security pretexts to squelch the democratic energies of the Popular Front. Left-led unions and civil rights organizations alike purged their leadership of any communist affiliation, while professional anticommunists pushed other organizations on the Left to do the same or land on the Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations. Support for left-liberal causes such as anti-fascism, labor rights, gender equity, and racial equality' provided red flags for investigators and agitators on the prowl for evidence of internal subversion.1

Dreams and Shadows

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sylvester A. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Racial Politics ◽  
Christian Leadership ◽  
Internal Security ◽  
Politics Of Race ◽  
Southern Christian Leadership Conference ◽  
Radical Activism ◽  
Martin Luther King

This chapter explains how the FBI targeted Martin Luther King, Jr. as an exceptional and uniquely dangerous threat to the nation’s internal security. The author demonstrates the numerous efforts by the bureau to oppose the influential activism of King and the organization he led, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The chapter explains the important shifts in American culture that pitted the more radical activism of civil rights leaders against an increasingly strident FBI that was determined to thwart law abiding activists who challenged the nation’s mainstream racial politics. The author argues that the pivotal issue behind the FBI’s repression of King was not personal antagonism between King and Hoover but the politics of race and repression.

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