The Black Man and Labor (1925)

The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, lead by Du Bois critic A. Philip Randolph, was founded in 1925, but would not achieve its first contract until more than a decade later.

The Communist Party USA, then known as the Workers (Communist) Party of America, held their fourth national convention in Chicago, Illinois, from August 21st to 30th, 1925.

Two significant movements have recently taken place among us. The Pullman Porters are organizing a trade union and the colored Communists have met in Chicago. Both movements have found opposition and from the same source. So intelligent and skilled a group of men as the Pullman porters ought to have long since adopted collective bargaining with their employers. But the Pullman company and other white capitalists have discouraged this with threats and propaganda and lately they have hired a silly black lawyer, who holds a small job in Washington, to help them.

Why is this? It is because since the days of slavery the black laborer has been allied with the white capitalist. Since emancipation he has been bribed by philanthropy so that he thinks the thoughts of the rich, the powerful, the employing class. At the same time he has been kicked out of the major part of the white labor movement and his resultant resentment has helped his alignment with capital. Today he is beginning to awake. The Pullman porters are going to have a union.

But beyond that if black men wish to meet and learn what laborers are doing in England or in Russia and sympathize with these movements they have a perfect right to do so; it is unjust of white men and idiotic of colored men to criticize the attempt. We should stand before the astounding effort of Soviet Russia to reorganize the industrial world with open mind and listening ears. Russia has not yet failed and Negroes must not swallow all the lies told about her. She may yet show the world the Upward Path. The Crisis does not know the persons back of the Chicago convention, but it asserts the right of any set of American Negroes to investigate and sympathize with any industrial reform whether it springs from Russia, China or the South Seas.

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Citation: Du Bois, W.E.B. 1925. “The Black Man and Labor.” The Crisis. 31(2):60.