Tuskegee Institute, Archibald H. Grimke, Thomas Jesse Jones, specialist in the United States Bureau of Education, J.R. Shillady, Secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Fred R. Moore, editor of the New York Age, George W. Harris, editor of the New York News, and Emmett J. Scott, special assistant to the Secretary of War. The committee requested the Executive Council that a committee be appointed by the American Federation of Labor to confer with a committee representing the interests of the Negroes. This request was granted.

At the American Federation of Labor annual convention held at St. Paul, Minnesota, in June 1918, the problem of Negro workers and organized labor again received considerable attention. B.S. Lancaster, a Negro delegate to the convention from Mobile, Alabama, offered a resolution asking for the appointment of a Negro to organize Negroes not now affiliated with unions in the shipbuilding trades. Another resolution was to the effect that Negro porters, cooks, waiters, and waitresses, section hands, and all Negro railway employees to be organized. The press reports of the convention under the date of June 12, said:

Dr. R.R. Moton, Principal of the Tuskegee Institute, and J.R. Shillady, of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, are authors of a communication asking for closer cooperation between white and colored workers. They ask that Mr. Gompers prepare a statement on his stand toward Negro labor, and charge that some unions discriminate against colored workers. They urge consideration of revision of union charters to permit Negroes to become members. The communication was referred.These efforts were not without some result, for sentiment began to change. In its August, 1918, issue the editor of the Labor News of Detroit, Michigan, said: The time has arrived for the American labor movement to face squarely the fact that the negro is a big factor in our industrial life, and that he must be taken into account in the adjustment of our economic differences. Never again can the negro be ignored. Time and time again the selfish masters of industry have used him to batter your organizations to pieces, and, instead of trying to win him over, you have savagely fought him, because they used him as a strikebreaker. But the negro must be made to see the value of organization to himself, and he must be incorporated into and made a part of the great labor movement. It is a stupid policy to try to keep him out. Let us work to shift him from his present unhappy position, where he is despised by the big business element, notwithstanding his utility as a strikebreaker, and hated by unionists for his 

 Prev. P 109/238 next